Seahorse ring

I posted this as a tweet a while back:

This is the "Ring of Minos", a Minoan gold seal ring, dated to c. 1500–1400 BC. 

And I asked if this was an inverted horse's head on the boat's prow? 

I then went on to talk about Phoenician boats with horse heads

And Phoenician and Greek sea gods who loved horses

And what mating season of horses has to do with all this...

In short, the mating season of wild horses, Apr/May-Sep/Oct, marked by the violent stallion fights for mares, coincides with the sailing season in the Eastern Mediterranean. Basically, in the maritime mythology of the Eastern Mediterranean, horse was used as an animal calendar marker for the beginning of the sailing season. You can read all this in my posts: "Trojan horse" and "Three sacrifices"...

Then someone replied to my twitter thread and said that the animal head on the prow of the Minoan ship actually looked very much like a seahorse head. 

So, what about seahorses as animal calendar markers?

Until today I haven't really looked at seahorses at all...But I did just now, and what I found is actually quite interesting indeed...

Two species live in the Mediterranean Sea: 

H. guttulatus (the long-snouted seahorse)

H. hippocampus (the short-snouted seahorse)

And, it turned out that "for most seahorses breeding season lasts between Apr and Oct and is related to environmental temperature"...

Funny that terrestrial horses mate between Apr and Sep...

April, the beginning of the mating season of both horse species coincides with the start of the sailing season in the Eastern Mediterranean...

Because this is when the winter storms end and the trading winds start to blow. 

As I already said, spotting the beginning of the horses mating season is quite easy, because you can't miss the stallions all of a sudden starting to fight for the right to mate with mares...And you can't miss what happens after these fights either...🙂

But I don't know if our ancestors knew very much about the mating season of seahorses...Possibly...Most seahorse species, including Mediterranean ones, live in shallow sheltered waters of seagrass beds, estuaries, coral reefs, up to 15m in dept. So they could have noticed this...

They were fishermen who lived off the seas, and knew the wildlife in shallow waters well...And so what they must have noticed, is appearance of seahorses in the shallow coastal waters in the spring and their disappearance from the shallows in the autumn...

As I said, most seahorse species live in very shallow coastal waters. 

But, during winter months, they move to deeper water, up to 77 m deep, mostly because of the storms...

Which batter the coast and would crash them to death.

According to seahorse lifecycle data that I could find, seahorses usually appear in the shallows by late April to early May depending on the sea temperature and go into deeper water by mid-October at the latest...

These dates sound familiar? 🙂

So our ancestors living by the sea and fishing the shallow estuarine waters full of fish, would have noticed that as the winter storms started to calm down, seahorses started appearing in their nets as the bycatch...

And that as the weather started getting more and more unsettled around the beginning of winter, our ancestor fishermen/seamen would have noticed that seahorses disappeared from their nets...

And the period between appearance and disappearance of seahorses was the time to go sailing in Eastern Mediterranean...

I have to admit that I couldn't find data specifically for Mediterranean, but all the sources say that seahorses migrate to deeper waters for the winter...

So I would be very grateful if anyone can get hold of any info on seahorse seasonal migrations from Greece or Turkey...

And that's it...Terrestrial horse or Sea horse, it makes no difference from the animal calendar marker point of view, if you wanted to use a horse to mark the beginning of the sailing season in Eastern Mediterranean...

How cool is this? 🙂

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...