Poseidon and the origins of the Aegean Bronze Age conception of sea motion

This paper presents a hypothesis on how an early attempt to give a deterministic answer to the problem of wave generation at sea could have been responsible for the prevalence of the Greek god Poseidon in the Aegean Bronze Age religious worship. The inhabitants of the Aegean shores, during the Bronze Age, were seafarers. First, the Cycladic civilization comprised a network of island-to-island maritime trade, while the Minoan civilization, centered on Crete, reached Cyprus and Egypt. By the time of the Mycenaean civilization, maritime routes had been established and flourished all over the Aegean and the Near East. Long-distance seafaring, however, was not without risk during these early days of the seagoing craft. Sailors were exposed to the waves and winds for extended periods of time. Indeed, they needed to master both, with their ships, in order to make it to distant shores and return alive. Today, wave motion, namely the propagation of disturbances at the sea surface, is a well-studied field of fluid mechanics. While wind blowing over the sea surface constitutes the primary source of wave generation, waves propagate at a speed that is not directly dependent on the local wind speed. In other words, the relationship between wind and wave conditions is not immediately evident to an observer at sea, who can witness large waves propagating even in the complete absence of local wind. The hypothesis of this paper is that the early seafaring societies of the Aegean Bronze Age could have primarily attributed wave generation to the action of an unpredictable deity. Archaeological and textual evidence from the Mycenaean period indicates that Poseidon held an exceptionally prominent position in the religious practices of the Aegean Bronze Age. In a time when the world was little explored, Poseidon could have been assumed to inhabit the domain underneath the sea surface or far beyond the horizon from where he would produce the waves that traveled all the way to the Aegean shores, upon which they broke. However, as more experience and observations were gathered at sea, the near-exclusive role of wind in generating sea waves could have become better understood. The incorporation of this understanding into the religious belief system may have contributed to a shift in the power dynamics between the principal deities of the time. Thus, the control of sea motion could have gradually passed from the hands of the chthonic (from below) Poseidon to those of the ouranic (from above) Zeus, who then became the ”prime mover”, responsible for the motion of both the sky and the sea.