What we have said regarding this illustration is applicable also to Fig. 10. But happily this shows us some important details in the stern. First, the staff with crescent-top denotes that she was the admiral’s flagship. The curved-line immediately below represents part of the structure called the _aphlaston_ (ἀ + Φλαζω = I crush). This was placed as a protection for the ship against the terrible damage that might be done by the enemy charging into her and ramming her. A still better example of this detail will be noticed in Fig. 14. One can easily trace this as having come from the Egyptian ships of the eighteenth dynasty that went to Punt. Immediately below this, in Fig. 10 again, and hanging down, may be either a protection against the enemy or, as will be seen in the ship of Odysseus (Fig. 16), a kind of decoration resembling some rich carpet, to ornament the stern where the admiral was located in authority. This second Phœnician illustration is from a coin in the Hunterian Collection, Glasgow. [Illustration: FIG. 10. PHŒNICIAN SHIP. _From a coin of Sidon_, _c._ 450 B.C.] It has been said that some of the larger Phœnician ships were as long as 300 feet, though this statement needs to be taken with caution. At any rate, it is accurate to describe them as being long, straight, narrow, and flat-bottomed, and as carrying sometimes as many as fifty oarsmen. Although the crescent-shape had for so long a time been almost a convention for the design of the ship, yet the nation that could found so important and prosperous a colony as Carthage, and that built ships both for Egyptians and Persians, would not be likely to be held down too tightly by custom where their own clever genius and invaluable practical experience taught them otherwise. By completely modifying the bow as it had been customary in the Egyptian ships, the Phœnicians started a new fashion in naval architecture which, permeating through Greek and Roman history, is still found in the galleys of the Adriatic as late as the eighteenth century of our era. Those bows, with or without the ram, even on a Maltese sailing galley, show their ancient Phœnician ancestry in an undeniable manner. Our information regarding ancient Greek and Roman ships is derived from the following sources: the writings of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Cæsar, Tacitus, Xenophon, Lucian, Pliny, Livy, Æschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Plutarch, Sophocles, and others; the inventories of the Athenian arsenals of the fourth century B.C.; ancient Greek vases; reliefs discovered in Southern Europe at various periods; monuments and tombs; mosaics found in North Africa, ancient coins; the Voyages of St. Paul; and finally ancient remains such as fibulæ, terra-cotta models, and earthenware lamps.