Liburnians and Illyrian Lembs: Iron Age Ships of the Eastern Adriatic explores the origins of two types of ancient ship which appear in the written sources connected with the protohistoric eastern Adriatic area: the 'Liburnian' (liburna or liburnica) and the southern Adriatic (Illyrian) 'lemb'. The relative abundance of written sources suggests that both ships played significant roles in ancient times, especially the Liburnian, which became the main type of light warship in early Roman imperial fleets and ultimately evolved into a generic name for warships in the Roman Imperial period and Late Antiquity. The book provides an extensive overview of written, iconographic and archaeological evidence on eastern Adriatic shipbuilding traditions before the Roman conquest in the late first century BC / early first century AD, questioning the existing scholarly assumption that the liburna and lemb were closely related, or even that they represent two sub-types of the same ship. The analysis shows that identification of the Liburnian liburna and Illyrian lemb as more or less the same ship originates from the stereotypical and essentially wrong assumption in older scholarship that the prehistoric indigenous population of the eastern Adriatic shared the same culture and, roughly, the same identities. The main point made in the book is that two different terms, liburna and lemb, were used in the sources depicting these as two different kinds of ship, rather than being interchangeable terms depicting the same ship type.

About the Author
Luka Borsic is currently Director, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb. In 2019 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University in New York, during which period he completed his contribution to this book. ;

Danijel Dzino is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, Sydney. ;

Irena Radic Rossi is currently employed as Associate Professor a the University of Zadar. She is an associated researcher of the Centre Camille Jullian (Aix-Marseille Universite, CNRS), an adjunct professor at the Nautical Archaeology Program of the Texas A&M University, and an affiliated scholar of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

Reviews

'Insgesamt betrachtet handelt es sich bei der vorliegenden Studie um ein Buch, das die Forschung definitiv ein gutes Stuck weiterbringt, da sich die Autor*innen nicht auf vermeintliche Gewissheiten der alteren Forschung verlassen, sondern in Form einer systematischen Auswertung der vorhandenen Zeugnisse, die in dieser Form voellig neu ist, durchaus spannende Ergebnisse liefern. Somit ist nun eine sehr schoene Grundlage geschaffen, auf der die zukunftige Forschung aufbauen kann, um nach Antworten auf die noch verbliebenen Fragen zu den Themenfelder Lembos und Liburne zu suchen.' - Michael Kleu (2022): Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781789699159
Author Luka Borsic
Format Paperback
Page Count 226
Imprint Archaeopress
Publisher Archaeopress
Weight(grams) 601g