GRE0180 – Lokris warriors boarding a Sea Peoples’ ship

Lokris Warriors Boarding a Sea Peoples’ Ship

The collapse of the Late Bronze Age is usually told from the side of the destroyers. This scene shows the other side: an Aegean coastal community fighting back. The Lokrians of the central Greek mainland, facing raiders from the sea, take the fight onto the enemy’s own deck — the kind of engagement that must have happened repeatedly around the Aegean between 1200 and 1150 BC, and of which no written account survives.

Fighting on Water in the Bronze Age

There was no naval tactics in the later sense. Ships of the period were oared galleys with a single square sail, built light for beaching, and they carried fighting men rather than being weapons themselves. The ram had not yet been invented. A sea fight therefore meant closing, throwing javelins, and then boarding: an infantry action fought on an unstable platform a few metres wide, where a fall meant drowning in armour.

The Aegean Warrior of the Collapse

By 1200 BC the heavy plate panoply of the Dendra type had largely given way to lighter equipment suited to raiding and skirmish: the small round shield, the cut-and-thrust Naue II sword — a type that spread rapidly from central Europe across the Mediterranean — javelins, the boars’-tusk or simple leather cap. The warrior of this period is more mobile and less protected than his palace-era predecessor, and the change tracks the disappearance of the centralised states that could equip him.

Why Lokris

Lokris faced the Euboean gulf, on the coastal route between Thessaly and Boeotia. Communities on that seaboard sat directly on the path of any movement through the Aegean and had no palace authority left to protect them after the collapse of the Mycenaean centres. Defence became local, immediate and improvised — which is precisely what the scene depicts.

Giuseppe Rava’s Original Work

Giuseppe Rava reconstructs both sides from the archaeological record: the Naue II swords, the round bucklers, the light galley with its oar benches and steering oar, the feathered headgear of the confederation as shown in the Egyptian reliefs. It is a reconstruction of an event type rather than of a recorded battle — the war that the collapse generation actually fought, and that no one wrote down.

This is a limited edition fine art print, hand-signed by the artist, produced in SRA3 format on fine art paper. Ships worldwide.