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ravel on the sea was generally more comfortable that over land. Road travel was either on foot or in springless carriages, carts or chariots that bounced and bumped over every cobblestone. Egyptians, Hittites, Aryans, Shang Dynasty Chinese and Assyrians had chariots long before the Greeks and Romans did.
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Until the First Punic War, in 264 BC, the Romans had not been sailors, and had never had a navy. But when they had to fight the Carthaginians, who were descended from the Phoenicians and were great sailors, the Romans learned to build ships by copying a captured Carthaginian ship. Soon after that, in the 100's BC, the Romans conquered Phoenicia itself, and from then on Roman ship-building is really just a continuation of West Asian ship-building - the same old Phoenician sailors, only now they have become Romans. By the time the Romans conquered Phoenicia, though, they controlled the whole Mediterranean Sea, so they really didn't need much of a navy anymore - just some patrol boats to keep down pirates, and merchant ships. Mostly the crews of these ships were Phoenicians, Greeks or Egyptians who came from sailing cultures. In the Late Empire, the Roman emperors needed all the tax money for foot soldiers, so they pretty much stopped supporting the navy.