Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the ancient warfare magazine podcast.

We did a magazine issue related episode last time, so it's time for an in-betweener.

And therefore, joining the team today consisting of Mark McAfree, Murray-Dame, Lindsay Powell, Mark DeSantis, and me, Jaspo Orthaus. The editor of the magazine is Stephen the Kishian.

Welcome.

Stephen is working on Hellenistic warships, and we did an issue about Hellenistic Naval Warfare

about 18 months ago, and it's a topic that I enjoy myself.

And I think a lot of other people are interested in it as well

because we get these really big ships

with catapults and all kinds of other kinds of weaponry on them.

But they also have an interesting feature

that has to do with the Rams. And so today we thought

we discussed that particular topic with him. Stephen, let's start off by earliest naval warfare

probably is just boats, people on boats shooting at each other, throwing bits, maybe trying to

board ships. When do Rams appear? When do we start

to try and take the ships out themselves? If we think about it, the earliest mention of the naval

ram in ancient sources by Herodotus. He mentions it in the battle, I believe it's in the 500s.

He talks about it. He used the word embalos, right, which means ramming Greek.

Emboos means anything that is, you know, pointed or can be trusted in, or can be used to

talk about a wedge formation.

So ramming in the literature comes in the 500s.

There's a lot of argument.

You know, when does ramming really begin?

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