Battering Ram

The battering ram is one of the oldest siege weapons in recorded military history, a heavy beam, often tipped with a bronze or iron head shaped like a ram's horns, swung or driven repeatedly against a fortified gate or wall to break it open. Assyrian reliefs from the ninth century BC already depict elaborate wheeled, armored battering rams used in sieges of Near Eastern cities, and the weapon was subsequently adopted and refined by the Greeks, Romans and virtually every other siege-capable military culture through antiquity and into the medieval period. Roman and later medieval versions were typically housed within a protective wheeled shed, sometimes called a tortoise or penthouse, covered in wet hides to resist fire and protect the crew swinging the ram from defenders' projectiles overhead. Though eventually rendered largely obsolete against masonry fortifications by the development of gunpowder artillery, the battering ram remained in occasional use into the early modern period and survives conceptually in modern forced-entry tools.