weaponry and armor: Africa Steven A LeBlanc and Katherine E Register, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2003) Stuart C Munro-Hay, “Warfare.” In Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991) Available online URL: http://users.vnet.net/alight/aksum/mhak4.html#c11 Downloaded on May 13, 2007 John Rich and Graham Shipley, War and Society in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 1993) Michael M Sage, Warfare in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1996) Pat Southern, The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2006) Hans Van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (London: Duckworth, 2004) ▶ weaponry and armor introduction Warfare has been a constant element of life since ancient times, yet relatively few ancient weapons and armor have survived to be studied Iron decays easily, as does the wood and other organic materials that early people used for weapons Bronze has a better rate of survival, but this material was not used in southern Africa, the Americas, and Oceania The study of ancient weaponry is further complicated by confusion over how weapons were used While surviving art and literature from Europe, the Near East, and Asia contains descriptions of weaponry and armor, the same sources are not available for other regions of the world In Europe weapons were used almost exclusively to kill enemies and prey A few daggers and swords, highly decorated and in the possession of high-status men, had ceremonial purposes Daggers, swords, and spears were typically used for combat, with only daggers intended strictly for attacks upon humans Slings were the first missile weapon, followed by the enormously popular bows and arrows The Greeks invented chemical warfare in the form of Greek fire and sulfur gas Metal, wood, skins, and leather were employed to construct head and body coverings as well as shields The users of weaponry and armor in Europe were almost exclusively male In the Near East warriors used the same sorts of weaponry and armor that were found in Europe The Assyrians are the earliest warriors of history of whom we have detailed knowledge They were armed with spears, battle-axes, maces, swords, and shields as well as bows and arrows Assyrians show liquid fire on bas-relief artwork Along with other people of the region, they employed simple incendiary materials such as blazing arrows, pots of boiling oil, and naphtha Babylonian spearmen protected themselves with square shields held edge to edge, as did the Greek phalanxes and Roman legions 3,000 years later The Assyrians were the first to develop scale armor that consisted of many small metal plates sewn on a leather jacket so that the rows overlapped 1161 In the Americas some of the aboriginal people used copper and bronze, but they never developed wrought iron or steel for weapons Stone arrowheads and spearheads continued to be used century after century, as they were in Oceania In Asia the Hindus became renowned as the best temperers of steel in the ancient world Few clues to the weaponry of ancient Africa remain The Africans passed from the Stone Age directly into the Iron Age, missing the Bronze Age entirely In the context of ancient Africa a weapon has to be viewed as part of a highly complex system of interdependent actions and beliefs Some weapons were empowered by the application of magical substances No matter how thick the hide of a shield or well tempered the blade of a sword, both were considered incomplete without the symbolic designs applied to them Even accessories such as sword sheaths seem also to have had great importance AFRICA BY CARYN E NEUMANN Western understandings of weaponry have limited application to Africa In ancient Africa the separation between military and civilian life was not as distinct as in the West While European weapons were made to kill, ancient African weaponry came in a wide variety of forms developed for use in political, religious, or other ritual or ceremonial contexts; not all were designed to kill Weaponry in Africa began with rock The oldest surviving weapons in the world are pebbles chipped into blades that were found in Africa These weapons also could double as tools or perhaps were an adaptation from tools; their use as tools no doubt preceded their use as weapons These rough weapons advanced into knives made of sharpened rock, spears with stone tips, and hand axes shaped like almonds One type of hand ax, the cleaver, has been found only in Africa It had a heft y blade used for hacking, slashing, and cutting A wide variety of raw materials, including quartzite, hornfels, mudstone, and chert, was used in southern Africa for stone point production Herodotus reported that Africans used spears with heads constructed from the sharpened horns of antelope The points, with distinctive tangs, were bound to spears with plant twine, bark, leather thongs, and sinew The binding materials would have been moistened before application Moistened bindings expand and become more pliable before contracting to their original size upon drying This shrinkage, and the fact that individual strands on drying tend to adhere to one another, leaves the point firmly secured on the haft The first long-range missile weapon was probably a sling, although no ancient African slings have survived Slings were originally used by ancient shepherds to scare predatory animals that were attacking their herds They gradually became weapons of warfare, used by light-armed troops against similarly defenseless warriors The sling consisted of two leather or sinew straps Each strap was attached at one end to the sides of a small piece of leather or cloth The other end of one