Ancient crews dodged ramming by rushing to one side and tilting their ship
In Greek and Persian sea battles, warships fought by smashing reinforced prows into enemy hulls. Crews under attack had a clever defence: every marine dashed to the side about to be struck, heeling the vessel over. Once the rammer backed off and the men spread out again, the hole sat above the waterline, a survivable wound.
Organised combat on water is more than 3,000 years old. The earliest recorded sea battle took place around 1175 BC near the eastern Nile Delta, where Egyptians under Ramesses III ambushed the invading Sea Peoples with archers shooting from ships and shore alike. The victory was carved into the walls of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. Homer's Greeks, by contrast, used ships mostly to carry soldiers; the first mention of a Greek sea fight, between Corinth and its colony Corcyra, dates to 664 BC.
The Persian Wars brought fleets of dozens of triremes and coordinated land and sea campaigns. Themistocles of Athens reasoned that Greece would be outnumbered on land but could defend itself with a fleet, the famous wooden walls, paid for by silver from the mines at Laurium. In 480 BC he lured Xerxes's navy into the channel by Salamis, too cramped for the larger Persian force to use its numbers. Persia lost about 200 ships to the Greeks' 40. Aeschylus soon wrote The Persians about the defeat, the oldest play known to survive.
Boarding was the other great tactic, and for most of history fighting at sea meant either boarding or preventing it. Rome, never a natural seafaring power, learned during the Punic Wars to grapple Carthaginian ships and pour soldiers across. By Actium in 31 BC hundreds of ships took part, many of them quinqueremes carrying catapults and towers. Only in the late 16th century did heavy guns shift the focus away from boarding.
Vikings sometimes turned sea battles into land battles, lashing their ships together so warriors could fight across the decks. Since the losers had no easy escape, such clashes were notoriously hard-fought, the Battle of Svolder being the best known. Byzantium, meanwhile, survived an Arab siege in 678 thanks to Greek fire, an early flamethrower that devastated the attacking fleet.
Source: Naval warfare
