Throughout history, humans have warred in the name of race, religion, colour and that oldest of ambitions: power. The creativity used to write amazing books, paint masterpieces, compose symphonies and produce inventions that have transformed the world forever has also been turned to the sphere of warfare. The mastery of physics, mathematics and engineering have been used to build increasingly refined machines of war.
No matter where the perceived threat has been located, be it on land, sea or in the air, humans have managed to build some sort of weapon to eradicate it. From colossal monolithic catapults capable of hurling bone-shattering boulders, through vast warships capable of levelling entire towns with a battery of cannon fire to missiles that can cross entire continents, our ingenious cruelty has known no bounds. War has shaped our civilisations, defined and redefined our human-made borders and even dictated our recorded history, with the truth of events almost always warped and corrupted by the victors, damaging our ability to learn from past mistakes.
Here we explore some of the most groundbreaking and notorious machines of war. Weapons that, despite their size and complexity, have gone down in history due to their infamy, arms that have been recorded due to their refined ability to wreak havok with an unsurpassed efficiency.
TREBUCHET 500 BCE
While humans had been killing each other for millennia prior to its invention, it was arguably only in the first millennium BCE that they started to bring serious engineering into the equation. Emerging out of China, the earliest traction trebuchets evolved from the ancient sling. Unlike the later and more famous counterweight trebuchets, they were small and were built so that only a few people were needed to operate them.
This type of primitive trebuchet worked by attaching a large sling to a long, wooden throwing arm, which itself was
