From this rude shape the transition was not very difficult to the bark represented in the sculptures of Sargon,[93] which is probably a Phoenician one.  Here four rowers, standing to their oars, impel a vessel having for prow the head of a horse and for stern the tail of a fish, both of them rising high above the water.  The oars are curved, like golf or hockey-sticks, and are worked from the gunwale of the bark, though there is no indication of rowlocks.  The vessel is without a rudder; but it has a mast, supported by two ropes which are fastened to the head and stern.  The mast has neither sail nor yard attached to it, but is crowned by what is called a “crow’s nest”—­a bell-shaped receptacle, from which a slinger or archer might discharge missiles against an enemy.[94]

A vessel of considerably greater size than this, but of the same class—­impelled, that is, by one bank of oars only—­is indicated by certain coins, which have been regarded by some critics as Phoenician, by others as belonging to Cilicia.[95] These have a low bow, but an elevated stern; the prow exhibits a beak, while the stern shows signs of a steering apparatus; the number of the oars on each side is fifteen or twenty.  The Greeks called these vessels triaconters or penteconters.  They are represented without any mast on the coins, and thus seem to have been merely row-boats of a superior character.

About the time of Sennacherib (B.C. 700), or a little earlier, some great advances seem to have been made by the Phoenician shipbuilders.  In the first place, they introduced the practice of placing the rowers on two different levels, one above the other; and thus, for a vessel of the same length, doubling the number of the rowers.  Ships of this kind, which the Greeks called “biremes,” are represented in Sennacherib’s sculptures as employed by the inhabitants of a Phoenician city, who fly in them at the moment when their town is captured, and so escape their enemy.[96] The ships are of two kinds.  Both kinds have a double tier of rowers, and both are guided by two steering oars thrust out from the stern; but while the one is still without mast or sail, and is rounded off in exactly the same way both at stem and stern, the other has a mast, placed about midship, a yard hung across it, and a sail close reefed to the yard, while the bow is armed with a long projecting beak, like a ploughshare, which must have been capable of doing terrible damage to a hostile vessel.  The rowers, in both classes of ships, are represented as only eight or ten upon a side; but this may have arisen from artistic necessity, since a greater number of figures could not have been introduced without confusion.  It is thought that in the beaked vessel we have a representation of the Phoenician war-galley; in the vessel without a beak, one of the Phoenician transport.[97]