A History of Weapons Read online

  EASE OF USE:

  PRECURSOR TO: Roman pilum

  MADE FAMOUS BY: Hercules, who was the strongest guy ever, so of course he could throw the hell out of the javelin

  BOLA (BOLEADORA) When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in South America, they reported that they didn’t trust the natives in this new land, partly because they fought with “arrows, and stone bowls that are fixed at the ends of a cord.” Indeed, the South American Indians did use such a weapon (as did the Inuit and Chinese simultaneously), and that weapon was the bola. The concept began simply as a single rock on the end of a string, swung over one’s head to build momentum and then released toward the target, hopefully crushing his skull. This “single-ball” bola would later become known as the bola perdida. One day the Indians of Las Pampas, Argentina, made a groundbreaking discovery: if you want to capture your prey alive, all you have to do is add more strings and a couple more weights. The result was a multipronged bola that could wrap up an animal’s legs and immobilize it rather than kill it. This was an ideal tool for the South American gauchos, who spent their entire day herding cattle. North American cowboys may have had the lasso, but the gauchos had the much cooler bola.

  EASE OF USE: If you don’t mind injuring your target:

  If you want the target unharmed:

  MADE FAMOUS BY: South American gauchos

  PRECURSOR TO: Medieval flail; tying someone’s shoelaces together

  SLING This simple strap of leather and cloth is another of mankind’s first attempts at ranged warfare. Simply place a stone in the pouch, swing for momentum, and release. Bang! Instant dead giant. The concept is this: you can throw a rock much harder when you have a longer arm. The sling accomplishes this, essentially lengthening a person’s arm and generating more power by centrifugal force. There are two basic slinging techniques: over one’s head, or in an underhanded motion near one’s waist. Whichever way you choose, the sling should always be swung hard enough to keep the straps taut. The stone is released with a whipping motion near the front of the orbit. Make no mistake—this can fuck a person up, and from a distance, at that. The range of a sling rock can even exceed that of an arrow from a bow. It’s also cheap to make, and ammunition is found everywhere. But—let’s face it—the sling has always been a pauper’s weapon, even in ancient times. It has zero use in melee situations, and despite what you’ve heard in Sunday school, it isn’t going to win many fights against a seriously armed opponent. Also, the immediacy of your attack goes out the window when you have to wind your weapon up by whipping it around over your head. It’s a bit like trying to ambush somebody with a tetherball pole.

  EASE OF USE:

  USED WITH: Rocks, bullets

  MADE FROM: Wool, flax

  MADE FAMOUS BY: David, who allegedly brought down Goliath with a rock to the head

  ADVANTAGES: Ammunition is plentiful

  DISADVANTAGES: User must build momentum before releasing

  DAVID & GOLIATH

  The Real Story

  A long time ago, there was a Philistine giant named Goliath. He was about the size of a grain silo and loved to taunt the Israelites. Goliath carried a spear, a javelin, and a sword, and he was covered from head to toe in bronze armor, save for a small piece of unprotected forehead (remember that for later!). For forty days he challenged the Israelites to send a champion to meet him in battle, and for forty days the Israelites cowered. Finally, a young man named David went to meet the giant’s challenge with nothing but a sling. David was so sure of himself that he only bothered to collect five stones for his ammunition. Not only that, he refused to wear the king’s armor. (Check out the balls on David!) David and the giant met on a field between two mountains. They shouted insults and threats at each other like a couple of rednecks in a bar fight. Goliath threatened to feed David to the birds, and David insulted Goliath’s foreskin. Then shit got out of control. David pulled a stone from his pouch, placed it in his sling, and hurled it at the lone piece of uncovered skull on the giant’s face. This pitiful attack made the giant laugh so hard that he fell right onto his spear. The moral of this story? The only way a scrawny, unarmored kid with a sling beats a ten-foot-tall giant covered in bronze is if the giant trips and falls on his spear. Believe it.

  ATLATL It’s pronounced AHT-lah-tl, but you can call it “kicker of many asses.” How many asses exactly? Put it this way: some anthropologists believe this ancient dart-thrower was the major culprit in wiping out the woolly mammoth. Like the sling, the atlatl acted as an extension of the arm, allowing the warrior to throw the projectile many times farther. It functioned much like the scooped ball-thrower you use to play fetch with your dog, only instead of throwing tennis balls, it threw deadly flesh-skewering darts. A crucial component to the design was the flexibility of these darts. The atlatl relied on its projectile bending during release, causing it to launch from its resting place like a spring. This design seems to have been ubiquitous, appearing all over the world in many places where the atlatl was independently invented. It is estimated that every culture on Earth has relied on the atlatl to hunt food at some point. Native Americans carried the atlatl across the Bering Strait during their mass migration. Ancient Europeans used it too, but then abandoned it in favor of the bow thousands of years ago. So when they invaded the New World centuries later, they had long since forgotten about this dart-throwing juggernaut. They were alarmed to see this primitive weapon in action, penetrating the mail armor of their conquistadors. These white old farts quickly decided it was time to write to their kings and request some lessons in the atlatl.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 21,000–40,000 years ago

  BIRTHPLACE: Europe, Asia, Africa, Egypt, Australia

  USED WITH: Atlatl darts (sold separately)

  FAMOUS VICTIMS: Woolly mammoth, Spanish conquistador

  NEOLITHIC BOW The atlatl was king of Neolithic ranged weapons. In the right hands, its projectiles were deadlier than anything on the battlefield. But deadlier doesn’t always mean better, and the atlatl was about to find itself in the world’s first-ever format war—the VHS vs. Betamax battle of the prehistoric world. And just like in that battle, the superior format would lose, as people were willing to sacrifice quality for convenience. Ancient warriors loved the atlatl, but they ultimately found themselves looking for a way to launch missiles without putting so much strain on their shoulders. (You try throwing a few atlatl darts and see how your pitching arm feels afterward.) Sometime around the dawn of civilization, possibly up to forty thousand years ago, someone figured out how to make a bow. This crude mechanism was probably whittled from saplings and strung with animal guts. Its missiles couldn’t travel as far as those of an atlatl, and its power was limited, especially in penetrating thick hide or clothing. But its ammunition (arrows) was much easier to make than the elastic darts of the atlatl. Arrows didn’t need to bend, since all the necessary elasticity was stored in the bow. This meant Neolithic man could easily collect an entire quiver of arrows, as opposed to a handful of darts for his atlatl. So the atlatl became obsolete, leaving us to wonder what could have been. Just imagine how much cooler it would have been if William Tell knocked the apple off that guy’s head with an atlatl, or if Cupid made people fall in love by nailing them with atlatl darts.

  EASE OF USE: (can take a lifetime to master)

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 15,000–40,000 years ago

  VARIATION: Pellet bow (shoots rocks instead of arrows)

  Chapter 2.

  IT’S SO MUCH EASIER TO KILL PEOPLE WITH METAL

  4000–500 BCE

  AFTER WANDERING in the wilderness for millions of years, Homo sapiens had finally begun to get his shit together. Literally. He now made his feces in a designated place, far away from his stored food. Perhaps as importantly, he now had stored food. Homo sapiens could grow his own crops. He even had the foresight to know there wouldn’t be any crops in the winter, so he should put some away for later. In his free time, he domesticated a few animals. And he was beginning to do somet
hing else fancy: Develop complex mathematics. And written languages! “Welllll . . . looks like we got ourselves a reader,” says one of the other apes.

  But it wasn’t all quiz bowls and spelling bees. Early man still hadn’t shaken those ape genes completely. He continued to practice cannibalism like it was going out of style. He may have had relations with those animals he’d been domesticating. And he still performed human sacrifices by the truckload. So of course he needed weapons. It just so happened he’d discovered a brand-new metal for making those weapons . . .

  Copper. Ancient man probably discovered this by accident, perhaps by unintentionally smelting some metal in a campfire. He later discovered that he could mold it into very precise shapes—with very sharp edges. This meant he could make tools. Hell, he could even mass-produce these tools. And that meant he could mass-produce weapons.

  EGYPT & MESOPOTAMIA

  COPPER DAGGER It’s the start of the Bronze Age, and believe it or not, swords are not yet king of the battlefield. Metallurgy is still an infant science, and it has yet to produce anything stronger than copper. Copper has a lot of good qualities: It’s durable. It’s very malleable. It won’t chip like stone. It can be mass-produced. It turns pretty colors with age. But it’s soft (about as soft as limestone) and therefore doesn’t hold its edge for very long. This means copper requires frequent sharpening. It’s also slightly harder to come by than stone. So copper can’t be used to make any practical blade longer than a dagger. This new metal dagger is no party favor, mind you. If placed correctly between the ribs, it can take out an unarmored opponent with relative ease. But as quality goes, the copper dagger is not a marked improvement over the flint or obsidian models. Why, you might as well be stabbing someone with a penny. In fact, if you own a copper dagger, you might find it’s worth more as currency than as a weapon. Consider selling it to a precious metals dealer and using the money to buy one of those newfangled socketed axes.

  EASE OF USE:

  DATE OF ORIGIN: Early Bronze Age

  (3000-ish BCE)

  USED IN: Egypt, Mesopotamia, India

  CAN BE RECYCLED INTO: Pennies, wiring

  SICKLE-SWORD (KHOPESH) The sickle-sword typically resembles a question mark, and that’s probably exactly what people felt when they saw this strange, undulating blade coming for them. “Sweet Ra the sun god, what is that curved stick of metal coming at me?!” The khopesh was invented by the Sumerians and used against the Egyptians in battle. It left such an impression that Egypt would later adopt the sickle-sword in its own military. In fact, the Egyptians loved the khopesh so much that they would take it to the grave with them, burying it in the tombs of their rulers. As you might expect, the strange shape of the khopesh serves a practical purpose. The hook on the end of the sword allows the wielder to yank his opponent’s shield out of the way. Once that’s achieved, he can use the edge of the khopesh to hack the enemy to pieces. You could even speculate that the curve of the blade helps with reinforcement, preventing it from bending on impact. This was especially helpful in an era when everything was made from weak-ass copper. Occasionally, the end of the khopesh would be sharpened as well, providing a serviceable tip for stabbing, because hey—the Egyptians liked to keep things fresh.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 2500 BCE

  LENGTH: 50-60 centimeters

  TYPE OF DAMAGE: Mostly slashing; some stabbing

  BEST DEFENSE: Arrows, slings, and other ranged weapons; also consider: armor

  PRECURSOR TO: The kopis, a forward curving sword of Greek infantries; saber; scimitar

  ALSO CALLED: Sappara (Assyrian); wicked shaap question maaak (Bostonian)

  SOCKETED AXE Once upon a time in the Fertile Crescent, in the ancient cities of Sumer, people discovered they had been using terrible, unreliable axes. This was largely becasue before the Sumerians, nobody knew an axe joint from their asshole. For thousands of years, people had been making their axes the same way. They would fasten the blade to the handle using lashings and rivets (basically rope and bolts). The head of the axe was heavy out of necessity, so it was often difficult to keep it on the shaft. The axe would fall apart in no time, often in midswing, and the axe head would go sailing off. The Sumerians grew weary of watching stray axe blades fly into bystanders’ faces. Luckily for them, their local metallurgists had just discovered how to add tin to copper to make bronze—a stronger material for making arms. They also came up with a better design by molding the blade with a built-in socket. The new axe head and socket piece could slide right over the handle of the shaft and wedge into place. The axe head stayed safely on the shaft and didn’t fly into their friends’ heads. Problem solved!

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 3000 BCE

  BIRTHPLACE: Sumer

  REPLACED: Lashing and rivets technology

  NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: Axe body spray, a foul chemical weapon favored by eighth-grade boys

  USER REVIEWS: “This new axe is amazing. It doesn’t accidentally kill my children while I’m chopping firewood. Thanks, socketed axe!”

  EGYPTIAN MACE I’ve always thought of the mace as a rich man’s version of the club. It packs all the blunt force of a crude Stone Age club, but it’s designed and polished for the fashion-conscious warrior. The mace is normally bisymmetrical from tip to handle, sometimes adorned with knobs on the head. But the architectural beauty of this weapon belies its brutal nature. It was allegedly the first weapon designed specifically for killing humans, although the original mace was little more than a rock on the end of a stick. The weapon really didn’t come into its own until Egypt, circa 3000 BCE. The Egyptians went all out, experimenting with mace heads of varying shapes: disc-shaped, pear-shaped, an even some shaped like the tops of halogen lamps. With the advent of bronze, the Egyptians found the perfect material for their mace heads. Bronze-plated maces could crack hundreds of skulls before falling apart. This was in stark contrast to their stone predecessors, which often shattered on the first kill. The mace requires relatively little skill and an incredible amount of strength. But if you find yourself up against a wall of soldiers in impenetrable scale armor, the mace is one way to solve the puzzle. Rather than attempt to pierce the bronze, the idea is to bash it to the point of denting or collapsing, shattering your opponent’s bones in the process.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 3000 BCE

  USED IN: Egypt, Mesopotamia, India

  PRECURSOR TO: Flanged mace; morning star

  ADVANTAGES: Can squash anything to a bloody pulp, even if it’s wearing armor

  DISADVANTAGES: Only used on people, which kind of ruins that whole “I only use it for hunting!” excuse

  COMPOSITE BOW The original bows were “self” bows, meaning they were comprised of a single piece of wood. This was fine until some cheating asshole showed up covered in bronze scale armor and ruined it for every archer this side of the Himalayas. Like the axe, the bow would need a serious makeover if it was to survive the age of metal. Fortunately, someone (this is debatable, but probably someone in the Middle East) had a serious stroke of genius. “What if . . . bear with me here, but what if instead of using just wood to make the bow, we add—call me crazy—animal guts, and then—wait for it!—we slap on a layer of raw, uncut diamonds?” Well, that turned out to be a pretty expensive endeavor, so they came up with a new material for the side facing the archer: animal horn. And the first composite bows were born! The layer of animal sinew brought elasticity to one side of the bow, and the layer of horn brought firmness and support to the other side. The result was a lot more energy stored in a relatively small bow—enough to pierce armor. The only drawback was the difficulty of maintaining such an elaborately crafted weapon. Humidity was the enemy of every composite bow. The layers were glued together (usually with more animal products), and moisture could cause them to fall apart. And nothing sucks more than trying to hot-glue your bow back together in the middle of a battle.

  DATE OF ORIGIN: 2000 BCE

  MADE FAMOUS BY: Egyptians, who may have gotten the idea from Asiatic nomads
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  PRECURSOR TO: Hunnic bow; Mongol recurve bow

  USER REVIEWS: “I’ve got a composite bow. I don’t need the Egyptian police to save me from intruders . . . except when it rains. Then I call the Egyptian police to save me.”

  THE CHARIOT Remember how excited you were when you got your first car? That’s probably how the ancient Mesopotamians felt when they built their first chariot. And just as we can admit with hindsight that our first car was a piece of shit, most people would say the same thing about the chariot. But in its day, the chariot was the equivalent of a Sherman tank. It rolled over infantries, gave mobility to archers, and changed the very game of warfare in Mesopotamia. And come to think of it, the chariot scene is the only part anyone remembers from Ben-Hur, so there’s that. Most historians believe that the chariot was introduced to Egypt by the mysterious Hyksos invaders—who brought it over from the Fertile Crescent. Chariots were a huge factor in Egypt’s defeat, and they would be in many battles to come. As if the chariot weren’t already badass enough, some sadistic fuck thought of putting blades on the wheels. The scythed chariot, as it’s known, was likely invented by the Persians. It made appearances at several famous battles near the end of the millennium. There is evidence that scythed chariots have been somewhat successful at breaking up infantry lines, and they may have taken out a fair number of opposing chariots in their time. But the primary purpose of these bladed war chariots was probably not to kill, but to terrify and demoralize. The way your neighbors were when your dad first gave you the keys to that Pinto.