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Oars on ancient galleys were usually arranged in 15–30 pairs, from monoremes with a single line of oars to triremes with three lines of oars in a tiered arrangement. Occasionally, much larger polyremes had multiple rowers per oar and hundreds of rowers per galley.
A trireme (/ ˈ t r aɪ r iː m / TRY-reem; from Latin trirēmis [1] 'with three banks of oars'; cf. Ancient Greek: τριήρης, romanized: triḗrēs [2], lit. 'three-rower') was an ancient vessel and a type of galley that was used by the ancient maritime civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Phoenicians, ancient Greeks and ...
A bireme (/ ˈ b aɪ r iː m /, BY-reem) is an ancient oared warship with two superimposed rows of oars on each side. Biremes were long vessels built for military purposes and could achieve relatively high speed. They were invented well before the 6th century BC and were used by the Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Greeks.
A galley slave was a slave rowing in a galley, either a convicted criminal sentenced to work at the oar (French: galérien), or a kind of human chattel, sometimes a prisoner of war, assigned to the duty of rowing. [1] In the ancient Mediterranean, galley rowers were mostly free men, and slaves were used as rowers when manpower was in high demand.
Around the 8th century BC, ramming began to be employed as war galleys were equipped with heavy bronze rams. Records of the Persian Wars in the early 5th century BC by the Ancient historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC) show that by this time ramming tactics had evolved among the Greeks. The formations could either be in columns in line ahead ...
Both are compounds featuring a prefix meaning "five": Latin quīnque, ancient Greek πέντε (pénte). The Roman suffix is from rēmus, "oar": [1] hence "five-oar". As the vessel cannot have had only five oars, the word must be a figure of speech meaning something else. There are a number of possibilities.
In 1310, King Robert the Bruce granted Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray a reddendo or charter making him Lord of the Isle of Man in exchange for six birlinns of 26 oars. [5] A 1615 report to the Scottish Privy Council made a distinction between galleys, having between 18 and 20 oars, and birlinns, with between 12 and 18 oars.
For examples the Isle of Man had to provide six galleys of 26 oars, and Sleat in Skye had to provide one 18-oar galley. Carvings of galleys on tombstones from 1350 onward show the construction of these ships. From the 14th century they abandoned a steering-oar in favour of a stern rudder, with a straight stern to suit. From a document of 1624 ...