One of a Kind: Weapons Tied to a Single People, Place or Inventor

The Mozi, compiled by followers of the philosopher Mozi in the Warring States period, describes the cloud ladder as a long extendable ladder on a wheeled chassis. Its siege chapters also set out the defenders answers, such as counter-ladders and fire, so attack and defence are recorded together.

A short, strongly recurved composite bow of horn, wood and sinew, often under seventy-five centimeters long. Its compact size let a rider twist in the saddle and shoot backward at a pursuer, the move later called the Parthian shot.

A double-edged dagger carried as a sidearm by Roman soldiers, adapted from daggers of the Cantabrian peoples of Iberia. Its exact tactical role is debated, but it is tied by the entity page to the daggers used in the killing of Julius Caesar in 44 BC.

The Japanese bow stands over two meters tall and is held about two-thirds of the way up from its lower tip. The Book of Wei, a Chinese source of the third century, is the first written record of the asymmetrical form.

A Mesoamerican club-sword with prismatic obsidian blades set along both edges, its name coming from the Nahuatl words for hand and wood. Spanish accounts describe severe wounds, yet the brittle blades could not match Spanish steel in sustained close combat.

A tube packed with gunpowder and fixed to a spear, lit to spray flame at an approaching enemy. The earliest evidence of fire lances appears in China in the year 950, and the page calls it an ancestor of modern firearms.

A heavy two-handed war club of feudal Japan, studded with metal spikes or knobs. It was used by samurai, is documented from the Nanboku-cho period of the fourteenth century, and worked by blunt force against armored opponents.

A push dagger of the Indian subcontinent with an H-shaped grip that holds the blade in line with the forearm, so a punch drives the point forward. Its earliest forms are linked to the fourteenth-century Vijayanagara Empire of southern India.

A Korean cart carrying a wooden frame of holes loaded with gunpowder-propelled fire arrows, first made in 1409 under the Joseon dynasty. A crew could launch roughly a hundred rockets in a volley, and Korean accounts credit it at Haengju in 1593.

A flat metal ring twelve to thirty centimeters across and 200 to 400 grams in weight, with a sharpened outer edge. Its prominence peaked with the Sikh Nihang and Akali warriors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Patented in 1718 by the English inventor James Puckle, a hand-cranked flintlock revolver on a tripod. It was never adopted for military service, and the page records only around two examples built, so it ends the path as a weapon that stayed a one-off.