This paper presents a hypothesis on how the prevalence of the Aegean Bronze Age worship of the Greek god Poseidon could be attributed to an early attempt to give a deterministic answer to the problem of wave generation at sea. The inhabitants of the Aegean shores, during the Bronze Age, were seafarers. First, the Cycladic civilization comprised a network of island to island maritime trade, while the Minoan civilization, centered on Crete, reached Cyprus and Egypt. By the time of the Mycenean civ…
Read moreThis paper presents a hypothesis on how the prevalence of the Aegean Bronze Age worship of the Greek god Poseidon could be attributed to an early attempt to give a deterministic answer to the problem of wave generation at sea. The inhabitants of the Aegean shores, during the Bronze Age, were seafarers. First, the Cycladic civilization comprised a network of island to island maritime trade, while the Minoan civilization, centered on Crete, reached Cyprus and Egypt. By the time of the Mycenean civilization, maritime routes had been established and flourished all over the Aegean and the Near East. Long-distance seafaring, however, was not without risk during these early days of the seagoing craft. Sailors were exposed to the wind and the waves for large amounts of time. Indeed, they needed to master both with their ships in order to make it to distant shores and return back alive. Wave motion, namely the propagation of disturbances at the sea surface, is today a well-studied field of fluid mechanics. While wind blowing over the sea surface constitutes the primary source of wave generation, waves propagate at a speed that is independent of the wind speed. Thus, the relationship between wind and wave conditions is not immediately evident to an observer at sea. The hypothesis of this paper is that early seafarers, could have initially attributed the sea motion to the "Earth-shaker" Poseidon, an unpredictable deity that generated waves through the shaking of the earth. In a time when the world was little explored, he lived perhaps underneath the sea surface or far beyond the horizon, but the waves he produced traveled all the way to the Aegean shores, upon which they broke. Later on, as more experience and observations were gathered at sea, the exclusive generation of waves by the wind was eventually understood. Gradually, the reign of the world passed from the hands of the chthonic (from below) Poseidon to those of the ouranic (from above) Zeus. He became the prime mover responsible for the motion of both the sky and the sea.
