Скачать или смотреть How Large Were Roman Grain Ships?

Short answer: From an average cargo capacity of around 500 ton up to well over 1000 ton for the larger ships.

This makes them of an equivalent size to the largest Portuguese carracks that sailed to east Asia at the onset of the age of sails.

Even as the size of the Mediterranean cargo ships shrank after the Roman Empire's heyday, they remained large and dwarfed the Portuguese caravels as well as the Hanseatic cogs of Northern Europe.

This is a testament to how much older and more established the Mediterranean trade was.

As an example of a very large Roman grain ship we can take the wreckage of the Alexandrian Corbita grain carrier Isis that was discovered off Sicily in 1989.

It would have seen service during the height of the Pax Romana in 150 AD and could carry 1200 ton of cargo.

Isis was 55 meters long and had a beam of about 14 meters. It had a cargo hold that was 13.4 meters deep giving it a huge volume.

She would have seen primary service between Alexandria and Ostia, the port of Rome.