Ancient man’s Explanation for Oceanic Behavior

The first step is to see what man’s earliest theories on the oceans origins are. The papers focus will be on Greece and Scandinavia. The oceans were born from a goddess named Gaia. In The Theogony “She bore the barren sea with its swollen waves, Pontus. And then she lay with Heaven, and bore Deep-whirling Oceanos and Koios” (27, lines 35-37). The beginnings of what man thought of the Ocean is that it was a god/titan itself. In Arthur Cotterell and Rachel Storm’s the Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Mythology it describes Oceanos as “was a Titan, the son of Ouranos and Gaia, but never an enemy of Zeus. As ruler of the encircling sea, which the Greeks believed surrounded the world, Oceanos married his sister Terthys and they produced 3,000 rivers” (65). Oceanos while a Titan refused to fight with the Titans and withdrew from the battle. It is no surprise man would assume the Ocean was a god, with how angry it can act during a storm, it does look self-aware and alive. There is another element to the ocean that Oceanos doesn’t explain and soon man was going to develop a theory to that. While Oceanos explains the Ocean, it doesn’t explain earthquakes that could destroy whole cities very suddenly. Oceanos seemed too pleasant to strike mankind with earthquakes so there must be another explanation. Also at the time man may have started to assume that the ocean wasn’t a god but perhaps a realm ruled by an angry one. In Hesiod’s Theogony we meet an Olympian named Poseidon “he who shakes the Earth and holds it” (23, lines 16-17) to those that inhabit the Mediterranean in ancient times, Poseidon is a prime cause for all oceanic disturbances. In Arthur Cotterell and Rachel Storm’s the Illustrated Encyclopedia of World Mythology “was the son of Kronos and Rhea. He was the Greek god of the sea and the equivalent of the Roman Neptune” (76). What does the name Poseidon mean? According to Britannica.com his name means “husband of the earth” or “lord of the earth” and is “brother of Zeus, the sky god and chief deity of ancient Greece, and of Hades, god of the underworld.” The belief in Poseidon/Neptune lasted till Rome’s conversion to Christianity in 380 AD. Now we are seeing how man views his environment, but how did he work with it? With a possible explanation for why the ocean behaves the way it does, how did ancient man handle working on the seas in ancient times? According Eric Rymer’s historylink101.com “Due to the mountainous features of the Greek landscape, overland travel was difficult” this means they had to slowly get a grasp on trading by sea. Fortunately they were located in a good trading spot and according to Eric Rymer’s historylink101.com “Greeks produced goods to trade for food from other areas around the Mediterranean. The bulk of this food was transported by boat”. Greece had a distinct advantage for where they were in the world. Some countries depended on invading territory to create an advantage but Greece really didn’t have to. These journeys were very profitable but were not without deep risks. According to Eric Rymer, pirating was an everyday struggle. There was a risk but with the risk came the rewards to the Greek culture. The pirating helped improve the Greeks advancement in creating a proper Navy to meet these hazards, including future wars. The Greeks also developed protocols for traveling day and night, Eric Rymer’s historylink101.com explains “ships sailed during the day and anchored at night. They would sail in sight of land and found harbors or inlets to anchor for the night”. The challenges of navigation first started through a series of baby steps as explained by Peter Tyson pbs.org “The first seafarers kept in sight of land”. The Phoenicians used the sky to reference where they were at, regardless of day or night as mentioned by Peter Tyson pbs.org “The Phoenicians looked to the heavens”. Once man had a grip on travel he had another issue to deal with and that was explain the sightings of sea monsters. With man navigating the seas and oceans he would from time to time see things that normal schools of knowledge would have any answer for. The explanation for them would go back to their mythology. When mariners would go out fishing they saw the octopus or giant squid as evil. The octopus was also known as a kraken in the ancient Icelandic saga book Örvar-Oddr “the hafgufa is the hugest monster in the sea. It is the nature of this creature to swallow men and ships, and even whales and everything else within reach. It stays submerged for days, then rears its head and nostrils above surface and stays that way at least until the change of tide”. The giant squid regardless of name may also been just giant sea weed according to Marinebio.org “The sea serpent turned out to be a twenty foot long piece of floating seaweed with a root shaped like a head and neck.” The mermaid or merfolk is a mystery that has been pursued for centuries. Sailors have been having sightings of these things for generations. According to Marinebio.org there is three stages of Merfolk that changed as society changed “it began as pagan water deities and supernatural female water beings”. In the Greek world the belief of the mermaid came from the events of the Trojan War, according to marinebio.org “Ovid on the other hand writes that the mermaids were born from the burning galleys of the Trojans”. Even Poseidon/Neptune was depicted at one point as a merfolk according to marinebio.org “Poseidon and Neptune were often depicted as half-man and half-fish”. In ancient times everything was connected to spirits and deity before technology allowed man to really analyze nature around him. The second stage of Merfolk is Christianity according to Marinebio.org “were not seen as a threat to the growth and popularity of Christian beliefs”. The mermaid was also seen as a moral lesson to women but also the amount of sightings justified its existence according to Marinebio.org “the mermaid served as a moral emblem of sin, and the second was the quality of evidence from contemporary and ancient authors on the existence of mermaids added to this 'belief'”. The third stage of mermaids was that of science who traced the evidence of all these sightings to discover a creature called the manatee. According to Marinebio.org “and so when a seal, porpoise, dugong or manatee was spotted from the ship they'd swear they'd seen a mermaid”. These tales of mermaids actually pushed science to find new marine animals as result of being on a quest to debunk this myth. Once man had a grasp on logic and science he could finally master navigation. Man started to gain control of his knowledge of the environment as explained by Peter Tyson pbs.org “English clockmaker John Harrison invented a chronometer that enabled sailors to accurately determine their longitude”. With the mysteries of the ocean unraveled enough to improve man’s marine database on oceanic behavior, he can navigate it with safety, technology, and logic. In the past man once thought that the ocean was a spirit or a god born from Gaia who befriended Zeus and helped him to over throw Kronos. Then he realized it was natural but ruled by a god within it named Poseidon who would shake the Earth with his violent earthquakes. He then realized it wasn’t ruled by a deity but there was magic involved on some level for there were mystical creatures that inhabited it. Finally he realized there was no magic to it and there was actual natural reasons for why it behaved. Works Cited