At one time, Mr. Adrian K. Wood wrote a book about ancient ships, which he titled: “Warships of the Ancient World: 3000–500 BC”, in which his companion as a good draftsman was, as always, a reliable master of the brush, Mr. Giuseppe Rava . This is a publication published in the traditional form for this type of works published by the famous British publishing house Osprey, which has specialized in publishing popular science works on military history for years.
This time, the period of the book in question is incredibly long, because fights on the surface of water reservoirs are almost as old as vessels created by human hands. This is because “Peace is happiness; but fighting is our heavenly existence”, as our family’s Renaissance poet – Mikołaj Sęp-Szarzyński (ca. 1551 – ca. 1581) once wrote.
Warships, which in practice very often served as merchant ships (it depended on the strength of those encountered), underwent a long evolution during the period of antiquity described. This evolution is only signalled on the pages of the discussed work due to its small size. Much of the content in books discussing naval warfare from distant antiquity is, at least in part, hypothetical, and in this case we do not encounter an exception at all. The hypothesis about possible contacts, both commercial and military, between the Sumerian city states and the centers of predynastic Egypt is very interesting. It was created based on the analysis of scenes depicted on the Gebel el-Arak knife, which was made over 5,000 years ago from flint and hippopotamus bone. This is very bold, but it is not at all unlikely to be the conclusion of Mr. Wood, who deserves praise for his intellectual courage, because trade contacts between these civilizations do not exclude meetings between them of a less friendly nature.
A certain amount of space in this brochure is devoted to the details of the construction of ships in the period in question and their changes over the years.
This is a book that I can recommend with a clear conscience to all students of ancient maritime studies in our region of the world. It is pleasant both for reading and visual reception.
