Ancient Warfare Magazine

Hordes of horse-riding Huns led by Attila crossing into eastern and central Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries AD have long been considered one of the deciding factors in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Yet, both the origins of the Hu

On display in cabinets at the British Museum and Petrie Museum in London, England are small bronze artefacts that are identified as ‘branding irons’. Long assumed to have been used to mark farm animals, the dimensions of the tools seem too small to p

The later Roman Empire saw many challengers to central Roman authority come and go. One, the self-styled ‘Roman emperor’ Sponsianus, is known only from a small assemblage of coins allegedly found in Romania, and first recorded in 1713. Only four coin

When, exactly, the hoplite panoply became little more than chiton, aspis shield and helmet is difficult to pin down. We have seen that greaves seem to have fallen out of use before the Peloponnesian War, but the cloak remained (see AW XIII.1 and XIII

By Raffaele D'Amato & Andrea Salimbeti, illustrated by Andrei Negin ISBN: 978-1472850980 Osprey (2023) – £14.99 www.ospreypublishing.com The latest release in Osprey's Elite series covers the ‘dark’ period of postRoman Britain and Gaul following the

The controversy of when and how the hoplite developed remains a debated topic in ancient Greek warfare. Certain items of equipment appear relatively early – aspis shields, bronze cuirasses, Corinthian and other helmets types, the sword, and spear. We

By R. Taylor Pen & Sword, 2021 ISBN: 978-1526788566 Taylor provides an overview of the ‘current state of play’ of scholarship on the hoplite and the formation of the phalanx, and on the hoplite debate in all its aspects. He also argues that the insis

When I started Ancient Warfare, people sometimes asked me whether I worried about ever running out of topics to discuss. Their reasoning, apparently, goes along the lines of “Marathon, Alexander the Great, Cannae, Teutoburger Forest, a Roman civil wa