The sea in culture
The role of the sea in culture has been important for centuries, as people experience the sea in contradictory ways: as powerful but serene, beautiful but dangerous. Human responses to the sea can be found in artforms including literature, art, poetry, film, theatre, and classical music. The earliest art representing boats is 40,000 years old. Since then, artists in different countries and cultures have depicted the sea. Symbolically, the sea has been perceived as a hostile environment populated by fantastic creatures: the Leviathan of the Bible, Isonade in Japanese mythology, and the kraken of late Norse mythology. In the works of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the sea symbolises the personal and the collective unconscious in dream interpretation.
The sea and ships have been depicted in art ranging from simple drawings on the walls of huts in Lamu to seascapes by Joseph Turner and Dutch Golden Age painting. The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created colour prints of the moods of the sea, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The sea has appeared in literature since Homer's Odyssey. The sea is a recurring theme in the Haiku poems of the Japanese Edo period poet Matsuo Bashō .
The sea plays a major role in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey, describing the ten-year voyage of the Greek hero Odysseus who struggles to return home across the sea, encountering sea monsters along the way. In the Middle Ages, the sea appears in romances such as the Tristan legend, with motifs such as mythical islands and self-propelled ships. Pilgrimage is a common theme in stories and poems such as The Book of Margery Kempe. From the Early Modern period, the Atlantic slave trade and penal transportation used the sea to transport people against their will from one continent to another, often permanently, creating strong cultural resonances, while burial at sea has been practised in various ways since the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
Contemporary sea-inspired novels have been written by Joseph Conrad, Herman Wouk, and Herman Melville; poems about the sea have been written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rudyard Kipling and John Masefield. The sea has inspired much music over the centuries including sea shanties, Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, Claude Debussy's La mer, Charles Villiers Stanford's Songs of the Sea and Songs of the Fleet, Edward Elgar's Sea Pictures and Ralph Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony.
Humans and the sea
Human reactions to the sea are found in, for example, literature, art, poetry, film, theatre, and classical music, as well as in mythology and the psychotherapeutic interpretation of dreams. The importance of the sea to maritime nations is shown by the intrusions it makes into their culture; its inclusion in myth and legend; its mention in proverbs and folk song; the use of ships in votive offerings; the importance of ships and the sea in initiation ceremonies and in mortuary rites; children playing with toy boats; adults making model ships; crowds gathering at the launch of a new ship; people congregating at the arrival or departure of a vessel and the general attitude towards maritime matters. Trade and exchange of ideas with neighbouring nations is one of the means by which civilizations advance and evolve. This happened widely among the ancient peoples living in lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in India, China and other Southeast Asian nations. The World Oceans Day takes place every 8 June.Early history
s depicting boats made of papyrus are among rock art dating back 40,000 years on the shores of the Caspian Sea.James Hornell studied traditional, indigenous watercraft and considered the significance of the "oculi" or eyes painted on the prows of boats which may have represented the watchful gaze of a god or goddess protecting the vessel. The Vikings portrayed fierce heads with open jaws and bulging eyes at bow and stern of their longships to ward off evil spirits, and the figureheads on the prows of sailing ships were regarded with affection by mariners and represented the belief that the vessel needed to find its way. The Egyptians placed figures of holy birds on the prow while the Phoenicians used horses representing speed. The Ancient Greeks used boars' heads to symbolise acute vision and ferocity while Roman boats often mounted a carving of a centurion representing valour in battle. In northern Europe, serpents, bulls, dolphins and dragons were customary used to decorate ships' prows and by the thirteenth century, the swan was commonly used to signify grace and mobility.
Symbolism, myth and legend
Symbolically, the sea has long been perceived as a hostile and dangerous environment populated by fantastic creatures: the gigantic Leviathan of the Bible, the shark-like Isonade in Japanese mythology, and the ship-swallowing Kraken of late Norse mythology.The Greek mythology of the sea includes a complex pantheon of gods and other supernatural creatures. The god of the sea, Poseidon, is accompanied by his wife, Amphitrite, who is one of the fifty Nereids, sea nymphs whose parents were Nereus and Doris. The Tritons, sons of Poseidon, who were variously represented with the tails of fish or seahorses, formed Poseidon's retinue along with the Nereids. The mythic sea was further peopled by dangerous sea monsters such as Scylla. Poseidon himself had something of the shifting character of the sea, presiding not only over the sea, but also earthquakes, storms and horses. Neptune occupied a similar position in Roman mythology. Another Greek sea-god, Proteus, specifically embodies the domain of sea change, the adjectival form "protean" meaning mutable, able to assume many forms. Shakespeare makes use of this in Henry VI, Part 3, where Richard III boasts "I can add colors to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages".
In Southeast Asia, the importance of the sea gave rise to many myths of epic ocean voyages, princesses on distant islands, monsters and magical fish lurking in the deep. In Northern Europe, kings were sometimes given ship burials when the body was laid in a vessel surrounded by treasure and costly cargo and set adrift on the sea. In North America, various creation stories have a duck or other creature dive to the bottom of the sea and bring up some mud out of which the dry land was formed. Atargatis was a Syrian deity known as the mermaid-goddess and Sedna was the goddess of the sea and marine animals in Inuit mythology.
In Norse mythology Ægir was the sea god and Rán, his wife, was the sea goddess while Njörðr was the god of sea travel. It was best to propitiate the gods before setting out on a voyage.
In the works of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the sea symbolizes the personal and the collective unconscious in dream interpretation:
In art
The sea and ships have been depicted in art ranging from simple drawings of dhows on the walls of huts in Lamu to seascapes by Joseph Turner. The genre of marine art became especially important in the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, with works showing the Dutch navy at the peak of its military prowess. Artists such as Jan Porcellis, Simon de Vlieger, Jan van de Cappelle, Hendrick Dubbels, Willem van de Velde the Elder and his son, Ludolf Bakhuizen and Reinier Nooms created maritime paintings in a wide variety of styles. The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created colour prints of the moods of the sea, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa showing the destructive force of the sea at the same time as its ever-changing beauty. The 19th century Romantic artist Ivan Aivazovsky created some 6,000 paintings, the majority of which depict the sea.In literature and film
Ancient
The sea has appeared in literature since at least the time of the Ancient Greek poet Homer who describes it as the "wine dark sea". In his epic poem the Odyssey, written in the 8th century BC, he describes the ten-year voyage of the Greek hero Odysseus who struggles to return home across the sea after the war with Troy described in the Iliad. His wandering voyage takes him from one strange and dangerous land to another, experiencing among other maritime hazards shipwreck, the sea-monster Scylla, the whirlpool Charybdis and the island Ogygia of the nymph Calypso.The soldier Xenophon, in his Anabasis, told how he witnessed the roaming 10,000 Greeks, lost in enemy territory, seeing the Black Sea from Mount Theches, after participating in Cyrus the Younger's failed march against the Persian Empire in 401 BC. The 10,000 joyfully shouted "Thálatta! Thálatta! " — "The Sea! The Sea!" The famous shout has come to symbolise victory, national freedom, triumph over hardship, and more romantically the "longing for a return to the primal sea."
The sea is a recurring theme in the Haiku poems of the leading Japanese Edo period poet Matsuo Bashō .
Ptolemy, writing in his Geographia in about 150 AD, described how the Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean were great enclosed seas and believed that a vessel venturing into the Atlantic would soon reach the countries of the East. His map of the then known world was remarkably accurate but from the fourth century onwards, civilisation suffered a setback at the hands of barbarian invaders and knowledge of geography took a backward step. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville produced a "wheel map" in which Asia, Africa and Europe were arranged like segments in an orange, separated by the "Mare Mediterranean", "Nilus" and "Tanais" and surrounded by "Oceanus". It was not until the fifteenth century that Ptolemy's maps were used again and Henry the Navigator of Portugal initiated ocean exploration and maritime research. Encouraged by him, Portuguese navigators explored, mapped and charted the west coast of Africa and the Eastern Atlantic and this knowledge prepared the way for the great voyages of exploration that were to follow.