Судан и Большой Ближний Восток

324 IV. Ближний Восток и его соседи are few interesting details in our illumination. The painter chose to render in picture the last phase of a naval battle, i.e. the hand-to-hand fighting, following the exhaustion of missiles and the use of Greek fire. His picture is almost a replica of a naval battle depicted in a manuscript of the Cynēgētica of Oppian, found in the Marcian Library of Venice (see Fig. IV ). 1 In both illuminations two rival ships are depicted in a head-on confrontation, prow to prow. In the illumination of the MS of the Marcian Library, the main weapons held by the fighters of both parties are shields for defense, spears and /or lances for attack, while in Skyltizes’ manuscript the defensive weapons are shields and the offensive are swords. Of course, both Byzantines and Arabs used a large range of weapons in the hand-to-hand fight whether on land or at sea confrontations, among which spears, lances, swords and axes were included. 2 It should be noted that the weapons used by Byzantines and Arabs are identical in the depictions of sea battles since they both used the same naval preparedness. In both Greek and Arabic literary sources, especially in Leo VI and Ibn al-Manqali, prow-to-prow confrontation appears almost identical, but Ibn al-Manqali adds more useful 1 For Oppian’s Cynegetica , see I. Spatharakis, The Illustrations of the Cynegetica in Venice , Leiden 2004. 2 Hoffmeyer, op. cit., passim; Kolias, op. cit., passim. Fig. IV. Naval battle in its last hand-to-hand stage