Weapons Before Gunpowder Took Over the Battlefield

The battering ram is among the oldest siege weapons in recorded history. Assyrian reliefs from the ninth century BC already show wheeled, armored rams, and later versions sat inside a protective shed covered in wet hides to resist fire.

The siege tower answered a wall by matching its height. Attackers could cross at the top rather than breach at the base, and defenders replied with incendiary projectiles aimed at the wooden frame, as at the Helepolis used at Rhodes in 305 BC.

The trireme was the dominant Mediterranean warship from roughly the seventh to the fourth century BC, with about 170 rowers driving a bronze-sheathed ram. A smaller Greek fleet used it at Salamis in 480 BC to destroy a much larger Persian force in narrow straits.

The falcata is the forward-curved, single-edged sword of pre-Roman Iberia. Roman sources including Livy are reported to describe soldiers fearing it in close combat, and Hannibal equipped Iberian infantry with it in Italy.

Philip II of Macedon introduced the sarissa, a pike of roughly 5 to 7 meters, in place of the shorter hoplite spear. Held two-handed in a deep formation, it gave the phalanx its hedge of points, though no complete example survives to settle its exact length.

The pilum was the Roman javelin with a hard pyramidal iron tip and a shank that bent on impact, so it could not be thrown back and could force an enemy to drop a shield it had lodged in. Legionaries threw it just before closing with the sword.

The gladius was the short, mainly thrusting Roman sword, between roughly 45 and 68 centimetres long. The Romans adapted it from a design they met among Celtiberians fighting in Carthaginian service during the Punic Wars.

Carthage used smaller North African forest elephants as shock and psychological weapons, most famously in Hannibal's crossing of the Alps. Their record was mixed, and at Zama an opponent who knew how to counter them neutralized them.

The Roman ballista stored energy in twisted sinew or hair rope and fired heavy bolts or stones on a flat trajectory. That gave more accuracy than an arcing catapult, and smaller field versions called scorpiones gave legions their own long-range firepower.

The onager was a single-armed torsion catapult named for the wild ass for the way its arm kicked upward. Its high, arcing throw suited attacks on fortified positions, and Ammianus Marcellinus described it as a standard Roman siege engine in the fourth century AD.

Greek fire was the Byzantine incendiary weapon, traditionally credited to Kallinikos of Heliopolis and projected from pressurized bronze tubes on warships. It is credited with helping repel Arab sieges of Constantinople in 674 to 678 and 717 to 718, and its formula remains unrecorded.

The crossbow gave a comparatively unskilled soldier armor-piercing power, and Frankish crossbowmen were a mainstay of Crusader garrisons. The Second Lateran Council condemned its use against fellow Christians in 1139 but did not extend that ban to its use against Muslims.

The Mongol bow was a laminated recurve of bamboo, horn and sinew bound with animal glue. An inscribed stone from 1226 records Esungge, a nephew of Genghis Khan, shooting a target at 536 meters, and because the glue dissolves in water the bows were wrapped in birch bark.

The counterweight trebuchet was the more powerful form in use by Saladin's era, first illustrated in a commentary on his conquests written in 1187. The earlier man-powered traction form had been adopted by Byzantines, Persians, Arabs and Avars by the sixth to seventh centuries.

The longbow was a tall yew self bow drawn by English and Welsh archers, fielded by the thousands. Its volleys shaped English victories at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, and its dominance faded when French cannon broke archer formations at Formigny in 1450 and Castillon in 1453.

The hand cannon was among the earliest gunpowder firearms, a metal tube on a pole or stock fired by touching a lit match to an ignition hole. It emerged in China by the thirteenth century and began the lineage that led through the matchlock arquebus to later firearms.