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This portal is dedicated to the knowledge of ancient warfare in ancient times, focusing on the early antiquity up to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, roughly 3500 years of warfare. With the help of the best web sources, ancient authors, archaeological evidences, recreations, illustrations, maps, animations, and screenshots from the highly praized Total War video game serie, choosed by history channel (Sega(r) - Creative assembly(r))

03/10/2020: The ancient slinger (part I)

The slinger is linked to its weapon, the sling, which was a primitive, cheap, but deadly weapon of ancient time, often underrated. Never running of ammunitions, quite destructuve and potentially very accurate at larger distances than arrows, the sling may seems deceptively simple, but its mastery required years of intense practice and skills not even match by archery. It was decidedly a specialist weapons, sometimes playing a pivotal role in ancient battles, as the most destructive of all three "psiloi" with archers and javelineers. It was also, unlike the others, never used on horseback, and perpetuated from the neolithic for hunting to the Spanish Civil war in 1938, going through many iterations and variants in history, like the dart sling and staff sling. Some ancient mercenaries which became proficient with it became legendary. So here is this story, in two stage.

Ancient-battles peeks into the ancient "sea peoples" or the achaeans and minoans from the bronze age and homeric times, but also the Mauryan empire and T'sin armies, the steppe peoples, the Celts, as the early, or at the opposite, very late romans, like the western "barbarized" ones, or the Byzantine, "Hellenized" romans. What we know apart the famous "triplex acies" of pre-marian times, triarii, principes, hastati, equites, and velites?
Before was a very early roman army composed of aristocratic cavalry or Celeres, derived from the Etruscan nobility, and a heavy phalanx composed mainly on spearmen by classes, and a reformed army by Dictator and general Marcus Furius Camilius, with six Censes classes, with rorarii, leves and accensii...
And what we know about the greek classic armies at this time, with hoplites and meprised psiloi and hippiko, and their opponents, the persians, and beyond the sparabara, takabara, kardaka and other troops ? -The greek-city states age became, with the Macedonian rise, the Hellenistic era, which created terms like "phalangitai, hypaspistai, chalkaspidai, argyraspidai, Leucaspidai, akontistai, peltastai, thureophoroi, toxotai, sphendonetai, thorakitai, hetairoi, prodromoi" were known and became a model for all combined army from the Herakles columns to the Indus river... A true encyclopedia of ancient warfare.