An Analytical Viewpoint

Relief depicting Persian spearmen Metatron, for those who don’t know of him, has made many excellent videos on YouTube regarding historical events and peoples.  He specialises in Japanese and Ancient Roman history, but regularly answers questions on other historical periods. In one of his videos, he gives his view of why the Romans used swords instead of spears, as most warriors and soldiers did in antiquity. He proposed that the Romans chose swords instead of spears because of the equipment of the opponents that they fought.  Most of them, he said were barbarians rather than the armoured men of later eras.  He rightly stated that the Romans would have quickly adapted their army to an armoured threat if they had to face one.  He gave an example of the Roman legions quickly employing the manica (arm guard) in response to the Dacian falx. While he makes a good point about Roman adaptation to the threats they faced, the hypothesis that the Roman soldiers fa...

Andean sling - Img source Wikimedia commons This is a question that crops up in forums and discussions about ancient combat.  Slingers were described by the ancients in very positive terms.  Suddenly they were no longer present.  There are scanty records of sling combat post-antiquity and many explanations have been postulated for their demise. The first is that slings were replaced by bows.   Bows became predominant simply because they were better, more precise, farther reaching etc. The problem with this theory is that while both slings and bows are biodegradable, the oldest discovered bows (Holmegaarde, 6000 BC) predate the oldest sling discovered (2500 BC, Lovelock cave) by thousands of years.   The theory also discounts all written evidence concerning the sling.   Slings were crude but powerful weapons which could project missiles much further than an archer could shoot an arrow.   Long range throwing also depended on the type of ammun...