Crossword-Solution: BIREME 6 letters, 40 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

The result was the _bireme_ (two-banker) which was speedily replaced by the still more efficient _trireme_ (three-banker), the standard battleship of all the Greek navies.[*] [*] By the end of the fourth century B.C., vessels with four and five banks of oars (quadriremes and quinqueremes) had become the regular fighting ships, but they differed probably only in size, not in principle, from the trireme.

Naval architecture had recently made great strides, first by the inventiveness of the Phœnicians, who introduced the bireme, and then by the skill of the Greeks, who, improving on the hint furnished them, constructed the trireme.

Finally, the principle of the bireme was adopted, and river-galleys were constructed of such a size that they had to be manned by thirty rowers, who sat in two tiers one above the other at the sides of the galley, while the centre part, which seems to have been decked, was occupied by eight or ten other persons.

But it is not so easy to see how the oar of a common row-boat, or the uppermost tier of a bireme, obtained their purchase on the vessel, and were prevented from slipping along its side.

The bireme and the trireme were adopted by the Greeks, apparently without alteration, save that at Salamis the Greek galleys were said to have been more strongly built and to have presented a lower freeboard than those of the Phœnicians.