Prows with eyes on Phoenician ships

Phoenician ships with eyes

Phoenician ships are often depicted as having large eyes painted, or even built & mounted on their prows. There are almost no contemporary depictions, as there are few uncensored relics from Phoenicia anyway. It’s mostly coins offered on commercial collectors’ sites.

However, pretty much all later sources claim that Phoenician ships had these eyes, as did many Greek & Roman ships.

The general position of the eyes on the upperworks of Classical Greek warships is similar to those that appear on Phoenician warships depicted on the coins of Sidon, Arados, and Byblos, as well as on an engraved gem from Amathus (Betlyon, 1982: 3-38, 77-142, pls. 1-4, 6-9; Basch, 1987: 328, fig. 702).

Troy Nowak (2006): Archaeological evidence for ship eyes

Egyptian nhs for “lookout” used for eyes on ship

But the custom of eyes on ships’ prows goes back even to the Ancient Egyptians. The general style of such eyes was the famous Egyptian Wedjat eye (probably another pun on its own).

According to the Egyptologist Wallis Budge, one Egyptian name for precisely these eyes on the prow was nhs, which means “awake” & “lookout”, presumably because the lookout on a boat has to be awake even at night.

And nhs is already close enough to √nks for a “phoenix” pun: If you slap a verb with P in front of that word, perhaps Egyptian wp for “open”, then you’ll get wp-nhs for “open lookout [eyes]”. This was probably close enough to pn-nks to count as a pun with “Phoenician” for the Phoenicians. And that’s probably why it’s always stressed that Phoenicians had eyes on their prows, just as with the horse-head prows.

(Of course the the prow eyes were also used because they were decorative, and perhaps inspired sailors to stay “awake” during lookout shift.)