A fascinating treasure trove of 13 bronze trireme battering rams have been found on the site of a naval battle off Sicily, of the first Punic War.

 Egadi, an island in the Aegadian archipelago about 4 miles off the west coast of Sicily was the site of one of the last naval clashes of the First Punic War.  In 241 B.C., 200 Roman ships went up against 100 Carthaginian ships in the Battle of the Egadi Islands. Actually, the Roman ships appear to have gone up against other Roman ships, mainly, captured by Carthage in previous naval battles such as the Battle of Drepanum (249 B.C.) in which Polybius claimed 97 ships had been taken and absorbed into the Punic navy. Rome’s superior numbers took the day this time, and Carthage was soundly spanked. So soundly, in fact, that they surrendered shortly thereafter ending the First Punic War.

The net effect of Carthage’s deployment of Roman vessels is that even though Rome won the Battle of the Egadi Islands most emphatically, the ship parts, cargo and weapons strewn on the seafloor are predominantly Roman. 

Marine archaeologists have dated the rams to 241 B.C., based on some of the pottery remains at the find site, the style of the armour and the date of a battle, which has proven an incalculably rich source of archaeological material from the First Punic War.

The part of the ram that fits to the business end of a trireme.

The large number of bronze battering rams (rostra) are still rare finds, but their numbers have increased geometrically thanks to Egadi’s extraordinary pile of Roman battle detritus. Out of the 13 battering rams found so far at Egadi over the past decade, only two of them have inscriptions identifying them as Carthaginian. The others have inscriptions too, but all of them in Latin.

The vicious, spiky-looking bronze battering rams are of great historical significance because of their badassness and rarity, but finding so many in one place connected to a single battle has provided scholars with a unique opportunity to study the ships  The rams were fixed to the prow of ships, custom cast to ensure a perfect fit along the bows. Researchers can calculate the dimensions of the keels based on the size and shape of the rostra.

Coming up from the bottom, for the first time, in millennia.

The archaeologists calculate that the ships could not have been more than 30 meters long and just 4.5 meter in beam, far less than the 36 meters previously estimated for the Athenian trireme.  In battle, the trireme was propelled solely by its 170 rowers. These wooden ships are believed to have been able to achieve a speed of 10 knots at the critical moment of impact.

Everybody's interested in the ram.

Rams mounted below the waterline had three horizontal planes that would slice into their targets’ timbers, cracking open the unfortunate enemy ship. The dispersal of amphorae and other goods on the seabed indicates that ships were indeed sunk, but did not break up on the way down.

A Punic, or Carthaginian inscription on one of the rams.

That ‘Punic War’ inscription is seemingly read from right to left, and unfortunately they mainly used consonants, making translation difficult,  but it might be something like “… ol(h)etarntlom“.\

Presumably, it is all about ‘boat crushing power’, ‘power’ and ‘boat crushing,' a perfect sentiment for such a tool. 

Interestingly, the term rostrum as a place for a speaker comes from the Roman custom of the victorious commander ascending to the top of captured rams, or in Latin, rostra, to address the citizens and troops.

This Carthaginian naval ram from the Battle of the Egadi Islands shows damage in the form of V-shaped scratches, attributed to frontal collisions with Roman ships (ram against ram)!