Liburnians and Illyrian Lembs: Iron Age Ships of the Eastern Adriatic

by Luka Borsic, Danijel Dzino, Irena Radic Rossi

Overview

Liburnians and Illyrian Lembs: Iron Age Ships of the Eastern Adriatic explores the origins of two types of ancient ship which appear in the written sources connected with the protohistoric eastern Adriatic area: the 'Liburnian' (liburna or liburnica) and the southern Adriatic (Illyrian) 'lemb'. The relative abundance of written sources suggests that both ships played significant roles in ancient times, especially the Liburnian, which became the main type of light warship in early Roman imperial fleets and ultimately evolved into a generic name for warships in the Roman Imperial period and Late Antiquity. The book provides an extensive overview of written, iconographic and archaeological evidence on eastern Adriatic shipbuilding traditions before the Roman conquest in the late first century BC / early first century AD, questioning the existing scholarly assumption that the liburna and lemb were closely related, or even that they represent two sub-types of the same ship. The analysis shows that identification of the Liburnian liburna and Illyrian lemb as more or less the same ship originates from the stereotypical and essentially wrong assumption in older scholarship that the prehistoric indigenous population of the eastern Adriatic shared the same culture and, roughly, the same identities. The main point made in the book is that two different terms, liburna and lemb, were used in the sources depicting these as two different kinds of ship, rather than being interchangeable terms depicting the same ship type.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789699159
Publisher:	Archaeopress Publishing
Publication date:	03/04/2021
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.89(w) x 9.65(h) x (d)

About the Author

Luka Borsic is currently Director, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb. In 2019 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University in New York, during which period he completed his contribution to this book. Danijel Dino is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney. Irena Radic Rossi is currently employed as Associate Professor a the University of Zadar. She is an associated researcher of the Centre Camille Jullian (Aix-Marseille Universite, CNRS), an adjunct professor at the Nautical Archaeology Program of the Texas A&M University, and an affiliated scholar of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations v

Primary sources v

Modern literature vi

Acknowledgements vii

Preface ix

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Research problems and previous scholarship 1

1.2 Overview of the book 3

1.3 Terminology 4

2 Geographical context 6

3 Eastern Adriatic populations in the 1st millennium BC 10

3.1 The Liburni 11

3.2 Other Iron Age Eastern Adriatic indigenous seafaring groups 16

3.3 Greek colonising activities in the eastern Adriatic 18

3.4 Piracy in the eastern Adriatic? 21

3.5 Conclusion 24

4 Archaeological and iconographic evidence in protohistoric eastern Adriatic 26

4.1 Underwater finds 26

4.1.1 Zambratija near Savudrija 27

4.1.2 Pula 29

4.1.3 Caska on the island of Pag 32

4.1.4 Zaton near Nin 38

4.2 Iconography 42

4.2.1 Grieves from the Ilijak burial mound on Glasinac 42

4.2.2 The images of ships from the Daunian Stellae 44

4.2.3 Situla from Nesactium 45

4.2.4 Belt buckle from Prozor 46

4.2.5 Relief from Varvaria (Bribirska glavica) 49

4.2.6 South Adriatic coinage 50

4.3 Protohistoric archaeological and iconographical sources for eastern Adriatic ships 53

5 Written Sources on Lembs And Liburnians from the 4th c. BC to Late Antiquity 59

5.1 Introduction 59

5.2 Lemb 61

5.2.1 Ancient Greek sources 61

5.2.2 Latin sources 106

5.3 Liburnian 139

5.3.1 Ancient Greek sources 139

5.3.2 Latin sources 148

6 Discussion 173

6.1 Lemb 173

6.2 Liburnian 176

6.3 Etymology 178

6.4 Overview of usage of the terms lemb and liburnian in ancient sources from the 4th century BC until Late Antiquity 192

6.5 Lemb and liburnian: the same ship? 193

6.6 Conclusion 194

Bibliography 197

Ancient authors not listed in Chapter 5 197

Modern sources 197