Sleeping Ships and Their War Anchors: The Naval Origin of Greek Architecture and Sculpture

Abstract

The many surprising features of Ancient Greek temples become natural if we interpret that temples originate in real warships, not metaphoric ones, overturned and stored upon supports; there are enough ethnographic parallels for such a practice. As well as certain references in literary sources and in vocabulary, the definitive argument that supports this claim is the comparison between penteconters from the Geometric period and Doric and Ionic temples: the shape of the whole entablature, the window aspect of metopes, the shields hanging on the architrave, the longitudinal light curvature, the size of the temples and the distribution of their interior, its axial symmetry, the creation of peristasis, the number and distribution of columns, the entasis, the placement of sculptures and the main worship statue, etc. The principal statue comes from the sacred anchor, which would be used as a projectile in the naval battles in the Aegean Sea for centuries before the invention of the ram; this practice can be traced in many heroic legends. Greek temples are more than buildings: they are sculptures in stone of beached ships which proclaim the Greeks’ familiarity with the sea and their mastery of it. In other words, their thalassocracy.