The deadliest weapon of the Bronze age

[Imperial Dave]

https://greekreporter.com/2025/10/21/deadliest-weapon-bronze-age/

I await comment 

[stevenneate]

I am always sceptical when someone says of an ancient technolgical leap that it happened 'right here and right now'. I am also not going to disagree either that someone made this, found it was better and then the idea flowed outward from there over time.

What intrigues me is the thought process of how did someone come up with this and what, who and how long did it take to get a successful prototype? It is a genius change turning a bag of 'waste products' into a masterful tool. Did his apprentices then take the idea to the wider world to make their fortune?

For example, I am master cheese maker in  Waššukanni for the king of the fledgling state of Mitanni. One day my apprentice knocks over a shelf of cheeses, and two cheese wheels roll together to the lowest point in the room. In an instant, the war chariot is born, I sell the idea to the king, and Mitanni dominates Mesopotamia. Soon though, everyone wants my cheese wheel carts and before you know it, Egypt, Hatti and Assyria are coming at us from 3 sides.

Only the northern Britons fail, because crumbly cheese like Wensleydale and Cheshire makes for poor all-terrain chariot wheels!

[Nick Harbud]

Well, everybody knows that for bows to conquer the world you need to be using wargames rules that make advancing against them similar to the experience of troops going over the top at the Somme.

Shame no one told the Greeks, Macedonians or Romans about how they were wasting their time with various long, spikey weapons....

 

[Cantabrigian]

What intrigues me is the thought process of how did someone come up with this and what, who and how long did it take to get a successful prototype?

I worked in a few high tech start-ups, and the conclusion I came to was that it's not the solution that is difficult, it's spotting that there is a problem to solve.

So once you've sat down and thought "is there actually something better than wood for making bows?" then coming up with the idea of a composite bow is not that difficult.

Similarly, once you've asked yourself whether there's a way of making your sledge more efficient, the wheel isn't difficult to imagine.

But then I was someone who was very good at making other people's ideas real, but who couldn't have an original idea to save my life...

[Cantabrigian]

Shame no one told the Greeks, Macedonians or Romans about how they were wasting their time with various long, spikey weapons....

So, how would a Roman legion have done against massed English/Welsh bowmen?

[stevenneate]

Would have destroyed the bowmen by advancing quickly and shooting their way in with artillery.

The English/Welsh bowmen, painted in woad and supported by chariots would have scarpered quickly after a series of unsolicited bowel movements.

[stevenneate]

Shame no one told the Greeks, Macedonians or Romans about how they were wasting their time with various long, spikey weapons....

The bow and the mace are the weapons of kings. Pointy sticks are for the masses.

Arrows also work well against the unarmoured masses and generally small shields used by those masses.

[Cantabrigian]

The English/Welsh bowmen, painted in woad and supported by chariots would have scarpered quickly after a series of unsolicited bowel movements.

I was thinking more medieval longbowmen supported by guys in tin cans...

[stevenneate]

I know, but you only said "bowmen".

[DBS]

The thing about the composite bow that always make me pause is the huge length of time supposedly needed for the materials, especially the glue, to cure.  It is one thing to say that a proven design needs a year or five to be carefully cured for maximum effect, but who on earth discovers that?  How many of us have been impatient even just waiting for paint or glue to dry properly in a matter of hours?

[Erpingham]

We can probably assume that the properties of the materials were to some degree a known quantity. So our early inventor(s) might expect to have to leave the thing to cure.  Whether they would be thinking of curing it for a year or five at the prototype stage may be doubtful. This understanding would come with experience.

[RichT]

On the whole, the ancient world wasn't driven by technological innovation in the way we are used to. The longbow (Welsh/English) was very effective, but its technology was completely familiar to Bronze Age archers (and earlier). Why wasn't it invented sooner? Perhaps because it was a PITA to use, or because people were happy with the bows they had, or because people made bows the way they had always made bows. Small incremental improvements in technique are more the ancient thing, rather than technological breakthroughs.

Even today technology isn't the war-winner that the military-industrial complex likes to imagine it is, as the various wars going on at present amply demonstrate (or at least, the technology that people were expecting to be dominant, isn't).

[DBS]

Of course, some archery experts get really cross at the idea of longbow versus "shortbow", saying the latter is a modern concept driven by a  mistaken idea of
Anglo-Welsh exceptionalism.  Danish bog bows from the late Iron Age are the same size as Mary Rose longbows.

I suppose the way I would vary what RichT is saying is to suggest that medieval English archers are specifically training to use a weapon optimised for war, massively overpowered for hunting Bambi in the forests when the sheriff isn't looking.  Furthermore, the English archers have access to far better wood, bows for the construction of, than the Sumerians or even the Assyrians.  Bronze Age monarchs want wood optimised for constructing palaces or crafting chariots, not creating weapons able to bring down a French knight at 150 paces.  The composite bow, whenever invented, gives a powerful weapon for use from a chariot (or later, a horse).  It maybe no coincidence that the one ancient civilisation to go in for long infantry self bows outside of Europe seems to have been India, again, far richer in wood resources than most of the Near East.

[Erpingham]

Of course, some archery experts get really cross at the idea of longbow versus "shortbow", saying the latter is a modern concept driven by a  mistaken idea of
Anglo-Welsh exceptionalism. 

And, of course, some medieval historians get cross with archery experts who are unfamiliar with sources  This is particularly a bee in Clifford Rodger's bonnet. Probably, the neutral thing is to say there were a range of sizes and strengths of bow and the "longbow" evolved by the increasing selection of stronger bows that could be handled by more practiced archers. It was this combining of skilled archers, strong bows, developed supply chains and massed archery tactics create the "exceptionalism" which separate later medieval longbows from earlier medieval longbows, IMO. But that's a different topic 

[DBS]

Ah, but that is precisely the point.  It is not that longbows are technically that much more advanced than earlier weapons, or even that much longer (the height of the archer being a major consideration in every period), but that the longbowmen trained from an early age to use the bow as a weapon of war, not hunting with occasional use in war, and hence could manage greater draw weights.  Combined with that, military culture in these isles evolved to encourage tactics relying on massed archery.  That is why the 15th century longbow is a superior weapon system to that of the 4th century "German" with a six foot long bow in Denmark.