10 Modern Weapons Used by Militaries of the Past
If there’s anything that humanity does a stellar job at, it’s devising new and innovative methods of putting their fellow man six feet under. From slings loaded with stones to nuclear warheads, the militaries of the world have their jobs cut out for them when creating new weird and wonderful weapons to use against each other. Many such weapons are unique and entirely novel, such as unmanned fighter jets. Others are based upon older designs, such as the 155-millimetre howitzers that make up the mainstay of Western artillery batteries, and are upgraded accordingly.
It might surprise you to know, however, that more than a few of the weapons we associate with the modern day had already been used by militaries in ancient times, Antiquity and medieval times — often to equally devastating effect as their present-day counterparts. Let’s start with…
- Flamethrowers
The first modern flamethrower was designed by the Germans and used in the First World War, seeing its first combat deployment in 1915 at Verdun. Flamethrowers became more widely employed during the Second World War, where they were mounted on tanks alongside man-portable weapons, being used to particularly devastating effect in the Pacific Theatre. However, flame-throwing weapons had already been fired in anger (I regret nothing) by the Byzantine Navy. These bellows-powered weapons were said to have been invented by Kallinikos of Heliopolis around 673 AD.
Flamethrowers were mounted on warships and blasted a chemical known as ‘Greek Fire’ at enemy vessels (the composition of which we’re not entirely sure on, but it may have been a precursor to napalm). The Byzantines were able to use it to devastating effect against their Arab enemies, as Greek Fire could burn on water without being extinguished. The Arabs would later pass on their knowledge of flamethrowers to the Chinese, who created a piston-powered device known as a Pen Huo Qi in c. 919 AD. This weapon would be used the same year by the fleet of the Wenmu King of Wuyue to destroy the fleet of the Kingdom of Wu in the Battle of Langshan Jiang.
2. Rocket Launchers
The worst nightmare of tank crews and video game police officers alike, the rocket launcher is a staple of modern warfare, able to deliver a lot of firepower in a short space of time. It does this with a chemically-propelled metal tube packed with explosives, and has been used for anti-tank, artillery and firework displays alike.
The original creator of the rocket may have been the Greek philosopher and engineer Archytas (428–347 BC), who was said to have made a steam-propelled bird. But their first use in warfare was by the Chinese Song dynasty, possibly as early as 1232 at the Battle of Kaifeng, against the invading Mongol Empire. Realising the great potential of these weapons after they conquered China, Mongol generals hired Chinese rocketry experts as mercenaries. Rocket artillery was used by the Golden Horde against the Kingdom of Hungary to, ahem, explosive effect at the decisive Battle of Mohi in 1241. (The Hungarians lost.)
3. Hand Grenades
Handheld explosive devices have been used in battle for more than a thousand years. As with flamethrowers, the first grenades were created by the Byzantines in the 740s — they were stone, glass and ceramic pots loaded with Greek Fire. Firebombs were also created and deployed by Arab armies, who used both Greek Fire and naphtha (an early version of napalm) in their devices against the Crusaders later on.
Hand grenades as we know them in modern warfare, however, were another Chinese invention. The Wujing Zhongyao, a military manual that was written in 1044, contains recipes for different kinds of gunpowder, as well as the first design for a high-explosive hand grenade made from iron. The Chinese can also be credited for designing the world’s first grenade launcher — the Fei Yun Pi Li Pao, or Flying-Cloud Thunderclap Eruptor — described in the Huolongjing, another military manual from the 14th century.
4. Mines
Grenades weren’t the only things to come out of the Huolongjing that went boom. The manual also possessed several descriptions and schemata for both land and naval mines. One of the former was dubbed the Di Sha Shen Ji Pao Shi-Mai Fu Shen Ji — literally, the Divine Ground-Damaging Explosive Ambush Device. The first documented combat use of landmines was about 100 years earlier, though — Lou Qianxia, the Song officer also credited with their invention, used them in 1227 against an invading Mongol force.
The Chinese also devised a type of sea mine dubbed the Submarine Dragon King, a spherical cast-iron device that floated just below the surface of the water. It worked using a joss stick housed inside a goat’s intestine to protect it from the water. When the stick burned to the fuse, the mine detonated, destroying whatever hapless ship happened to be above it at the time.
5. Armoured Warships
Armoured fighting ships are nowadays a staple of naval warfare, dating back to 19th-century ironclads, to the dreadnoughts that fought in World War One, to the powerful battleships that sailed to war in World War Two, all the way up to modern guided missile destroyers. However, Korean Admiral Yi Sun-sin had everybody else beat by about 300 years. When Japanese shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi attempted to conquer Joseon Korea in the 1590s, Admiral Yi deployed a superweapon: the Geobukseon, or Turtle Ship.
The Turtle Ship, in case you were wondering, was a warship with a strong, curved wooden roof covered in iron spikes to prevent boardings and deflect incoming arrows and musket balls. Since the Japanese navy prioritised boarding and rarely mounted cannons on their ships at the time, the Turtle Ships were practically invincible. They contributed directly to many of Admiral Yi’s greatest victories — indeed, Yi was said to have never lost a single battle. In one such victory, Yi and his Turtle Ships almost singlehandedly stopped the entire invasion, after a huge Japanese army was left outside of Pyongyang without supplies or reinforcements from the sea.
6. Chemical Warfare
As many a student of the First World War will know all too well, chemical weapons can be devastating when deployed against massed groups of unprepared infantry. The first documented users of poison gas were not, however, the Germans or the British, but the ancient Spartans. During the Siege of Plataea in 429 BC, in the Peleponnesian Wars, Spartan troops lit a mixture of wood, pitch and sulphur under the walls, the smoke knocking out the defending Athenians and leaving the city defenceless.
The Sassanians, an early Arab nation in Syria, also made use of sulphur dioxide during their war with the Romans. In the Siege of Dura-Europos (256 AD), they ignited a bitumen-sulphur mixture inside an underground shaft mine that they dug to attack the city. The resultant cloud of deadly gas killed twenty Roman soldiers who were digging after the Sassanian sappers. This attack is the earliest archaeological evidence of chemical warfare, with traces of sulphur dioxide being found in the tunnels in a 2009 dig.
7. Torpedoes
As mentioned earlier, the Byzantines had a remarkable penchant for using powerful naval flamethrowers loaded to turn their foes into shishkebabs. No Arab galleys could get anywhere near a Byzantine dromon blasting streams of fiery death at them, unless they were to sacrifice a ship to destroy it. Then along came Hassan al-Rammah, who appeared in 1275 to write a military manual of his own — The Book of Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices.
In this he described a rocket-propelled device, a “self-moving and combusting egg” that shot across the water before exploding in a ball of fire. What al-Rammah essentially designed was the first torpedo, a weapon that would have allowed Arab warships to engage Byzantium’s terrifying dromons from far away without having to worry about their beards being scorched off.
8. Special Forces
The subject of many a video-game and action B-movie, special forces soldiers are without a doubt some of the fiercest people to devote their lives to fight for their country. They are, however, often associated as being a distinctly modern concept to warfare. After all, how many medieval knights do you know of that wore balaklavas and snuck around at night in full-black gear? You might be surprised to learn, then, that the first known spec-ops unit wasn’t created by modern armies or even by the medieval Chinese. That honour goes to the Medjay from Ancient Egypt.
Initially recruited from a tribe in Nubia, they were used variously as desert scouts and sheriffs, making them similar to modern day Army Rangers. The Medjay were also recruited as elite commandos during wartime, most notably for the Theban Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties’ campaign against the Hyksos in c. 1550 BC. After the eventual unification of Egypt they contributed towards, they became an elite police force operating outside and above the typical hierarchy. (I’m 95 percent certain, however, that they didn’t fight the Scorpion King.)
9. Guerrilla Tactics
Wearing down a more massive army than yourself has been refined to an artform throughout the 20th century. Starting out with the Boers, before leading up to the various European resistance movements against Nazi Germany and finally the Taliban and ISIL we all hear about in the news today, guerrillas — like special operators — are frequently depicted in modern media, and thus we associate their tactics with contemporary warfare.
ISIL and the Taliban, however, weren’t the first Islamic terrorist organisations to wreak havoc against Western armies, though — that would be the Nizari Ismailis, better known as the Order of Assassins. Originally formed in Alamut in modern Iran to resist domination by the Seljuq Turks, the Assassins really made a name for themselves during the Crusades. They conducted a 200-year long streak of guerrilla warfare against their enemies, before being obliterated by the conquering Mongol hordes after Alamut fell in 1256.
That said, it’s probably safe to presume that using irregular tactics to destroy larger armies is as old as armies themselves.
10. Death Rays
Most people tend to associate death rays either with experimental military weapons, science fiction or James Bond-esque villainy. Not a lot of other people know that, during the Siege of Syracuse (213–212 BC), the great scientist Archimedes designed one two thousand years before supervillains could put them to use in their dastardly plans. By using a network of parabolic mirrors to focus the powerful Mediterranean sun into a beam, the defenders of Syracuse could have set incoming Roman ships ablaze from afar.
The existence of Archimedes’ heat ray has been hotly debated since the Renaissance. Ergo, in 1973, Greek scientist Ioannis Sakas built one and tested it against a mock-up Roman trireme — and it worked, destroying the ship. In 2006 and 2010, however, experiments for the television show MythBusters were unable to set a ship alight, instead concluding that the heat ray was better suited to dazzling and disorienting ship crews. Either way, if the stories about its deployment are true, Archimedes’ heat ray would technically have been the first ever directed-energy weapon.
So there we have it. It is said of weapons development that it is a race between offence and defence — that’s to say, inventing a new offence to counter a defence, and vice-versa. Though if these ancient war machines say anything, it is, in equal measure, a race of perfection. What such a similar list as this one might have to say in a thousand years, even the best historians cannot say.
It is probable, however, that weapon systems in a millennium’s time will be perfections of extant ones, which in many regards can be considered improvements on war machines pioneered millennia earlier. The most radical inventions, such as air power, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence, will always supplement, rather than replace, these perfections.
Thank you all for reading, and I will see you again soon.
~ Harry