Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Heroes of History： Ancient Slingers

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Aug. 28, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

14:49

Heroes of History： Ancient Slingers

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	I've got some interesting information about an ancient weapon, a very humble weapon that stretches back far beyond recorded history.
	And it's one of my favourite ancient weapons because of how easy and cheap to make it is.
	So the sling is one of those ubiquitous weapons that appears in almost every culture throughout history because of how useful and practical it is.
	With minimal resources you can create a very dangerous weapon.
	Some cultures were absolutely famous for their slingers, such as the Balaric Islanders and the Rhodians, as well as the Israelites, which is why you have the story of David and Goliath.
	These people took their slinging very, very seriously.
	For example, Strabo tells us that in their training and use of slings of such, from childhood up, that they would not so much as give bread to their children unless they had first hit it with the sling.
	Vegetas tells us in Dere Militari, recruits are taught the art of throwing stones with both the hand and the sling.
	The inhabitants of the Baleric Islands are said to be the inventors of slings, which they weren't, and have managed them with surprising dexterity, owing to the manner of their bringing up children.
	Children were not allowed to have food by their mothers until they first struck it with their sling.
	Soldiers, notwithstanding, the defensive armour are often more annoyed by the round stones from the sling than by all the arrows of the enemy.
	Stones kill without mangling the body, and the contusion is mortal without loss of blood.
	It is universally known that the ancients employed slingers in all their engagements, and there is greater reason for instructing all troops without exception in this exercise, as the sling cannot be reckoned any encumbrance, and often is the greatest service, especially when they are obliged to engage in stony places, to defend a mountain or eminence, to repulse an enemy attack at the castle or city.
	Even in modern times, the Balearic Islanders still practice slinging as a sport, and even hold competitions for it.
	So a few years ago I set about making a braided sling of my own, and it was really fun, and basically worked along the same lines as braiding hair.
	You basically get nine strands of whatever material you're using, in my case I used wool, and you take three strands into three groups, and then braid it like it was a normal braid.
	And halfway through the sling, you take half of the braids and braid them into a pouch, as you can see in the picture.
	I'll leave a link in the description box if you fancy trying this out yourself, and I would highly recommend it.
	It's really great fun.
	This was the end result, and I just want to stress that this is a sling, and this is a sling shot.
	Anyway, I used denim to create the pouch, but I did learn fairly quickly that denim isn't actually the most hardest wearing of materials.
	I strongly recommend leather for the pouch.
	And so I took my sling out practicing.
	and after a while, I didn't get too bad.
	Whatever, you ready?
	Alright, yeah, go.
	I was gonna say, it's a hell of a third.
	What you don't see here are the hours and hours I spent on my own just slinging away while listening to an audiobook in my headphones.
	I was using a technique called the Byzantine style, which is named after a Greek column found in Constantinople depicting slingers using this kind of technique.
	I found that it gave a lot of power without sacrificing accuracy.
	For example, with the Baleric slingers swinging the sling around before they take the shot, I found that that sort of technique really took a lot of practice to get used to and didn't really confer many advantages.
	There certainly wasn't extra energy involved.
	The flick of the wrist is much more important than the velocity of the sling swinging around beforehand.
	I severely doubt many slingers actually did spend a lot of time swinging the sling around before releasing.
	It just ruins your aim.
	You don't get any extra power, especially if you get it to a kind of point of maximum velocity around your head.
	You have to slow down very slightly to snap the wrist for it to loose.
	And it really doesn't confer much in the way of advantage, in my opinion.
	But I think that it's down to the length of sling that the Baleric style is more useful.
	It's much more impractical to do the Baleric method using a long sling, and it was a lot less practical to do the Byzantine method with a short sling.
	So it's probably down to technique and equipment.
	To really maximise the force that you transfer to the shot, it's very much like throwing a punch.
	The power is coming from your legs, and you have to spend a little bit of time winding it up, which is why in the Byzantine style, you take a full circuit around your head before releasing.
	It's very important because otherwise you kind of spoil the power of the shot and you also screw your accuracy up, as demonstrated by my very handsome friend Scott, who I'm going to say he did not practice this nearly as much as I did.
	It might be hard to see, but Scott kind of did a bit of a double jump in that video.
	Kind of spoiled his aim and also lost a lot of power from the shot.
	It was entirely my fault.
	I'd been teaching him that day and I'm not a very good teacher.
	But basically, you don't really move.
	You just kind of take...
	You start with your legs together, and then you take a step forward as you're winding up the shot, and then lead into the release as you're taking that step.
	That really transfers all the power from your legs and hips straight through to your arm and then you whip it with your wrist.
	You hold the sling by placing the loop end over one of your fingers.
	I use my middle finger.
	And then in the same hand holding the toggle end between thumb and forefinger.
	And you use that to then control how the sling's being used.
	I thought when I started it it'd be really difficult to judge when to release and let the toggle fly out of your hand, but it all really comes naturally to you as soon as you start doing it.
	The bullet in the sling wants to come out as soon as you start rotating it around your head, and so it's literally just a matter of casting it in the right direction as if you were actually throwing something.
	We never had any accidents doing it because it was just so easy to get the sling bullet to travel ahead of you instead of around you in some way.
	It's very d i it was actually very difficult to fluff it up.
	The problem was really just accuracy in front of you and making sure you were getting as much power as you could get into the shot.
	After a while this sling wore out because it was just made of wool and I was firing rocks in it all day.
	And Scott ended up procuring some paracord.
	And the lack of elasticity in the paracord made the sling so much more powerful.
	It's probably hard to tell from the video, but the paracord sling was just so much more powerful.
	With the wool sling I was getting ranges of between, I would estimate, 60 to 80 meters, but with the paracord sling, well over 100 meters, well over.
	And this was with chalk, a very light rock that just happened to be laying around where we were doing this.
	If you had, for example, river stones, which are something that you would absolutely collect if you were an ancient slinger, or at best, lead bullets, which they did indeed make in the ancient world, and often inscribed with things like catch this, you would get a much greater range.
	I don't have any lead bullets to try with, which is a shame, but you would get a far greater range with these.
	There is actually an online slinging community, and they often do sort of a secret Santa, where you make a sling and then you send your sling to someone else.
	And I made one of my usual paracord slings and sent it to a gentleman in Australia.
	And some gentleman in America sent me this absolute thing of beauty.
	It is so magnificently crafted that I was embarrassed at the poor quality of my own sling that I sent in return.
	However, I tried this out a couple of times and it's very much a decorative piece of equipment.
	The cords are very thick and the loop and the toggle are very clumsy to use.
	Mine were all very much for use and effect rather than decoration.
	But this is still one of my favourite possessions.
	So at this point you're probably thinking, well, okay, this all sounds interesting, but what's the damage?
	I can assure you that you would not want to be hit by a sling bullet.
	this is a very dangerous weapon this damage was done by the wool sling at about twenty metres on an abandoned pallet on an abandoned none of these are repeated hits to the same spot either These are all one-hit occurrences.
	I'm not even joking when I say I'm genuinely impressed at the raw power you can generate with a sling.
	The pallet wasn't especially hard though, and when we changed to the paracord slings we used the bit of wood that you can see in the videos.
	It's a very very hard bit of plywood that we found and it had effectively been cured by the sun, so it was literally rigid and rock solid.
	And it really took a beating.
	I am left in absolutely no doubt that the sling was a very dangerous weapon, which I think is really impressive given how innocuous it looks.
	It's just a length of string with a pouch and a rock.
	I'll leave you with an ancient account of slings from Xenophon, an Athenian soldier who wrote an account of a Greek expedition into the Persian Empire, and how they were harried back to Greece by a force of Persians.
	They breakfasted and crossed the rivers Apatas, marching in regular order, with the beasts and mob of the army in the middle.
	They had not advanced far on their route when Mithridates made his appearance again, with about a couple of hundred horsemen at his back, and bowmen and slingers twice as many, as nimble fellows as a man might hope to see.
	He approached the Hellenes as if he were friendly, but when they had got to fairly close quarters, all of a sudden some of them, whether mounted or on foot, began shooting with their bows and arrows and another set with slings, wounding the men.
	The rear guard of the Hellenes suffered for a while severely without being able to retaliate, for the Cretans had far shorter range than the Persians, and at the same time, being light armed troops, they lay cooped up within the ranks of the heavy infantry, while the javelin men again did not shoot far enough to reach the enemy's slingers.
	This being so, Xenophon thought that there was nothing for it but to charge, and charge they did, some of the heavy and light infantry who were guarding the rear with him, but for all their charging they did not catch a single man.
	The dearth of cavalry told against the Hellenes, nor were their infantry able to overhaul the enemy's infantry, for the long start they had and considering the shortness of the race, for it was out of question to pursue them far from the main body of the army.
	On the other hand, the Asiatic cavalry, even while fleeing, poured volleys of arrows behind their backs and wounded the pursuers, while the Helenes must fall back fighting every step of the way they had measured in the pursuit, so by the end of the day they had not much gone much more than three miles, and in the late afternoon they reached the villages.
	Xenophon admitted they were right in blaming him.
	No better proof was wanted than the result.
	The fact is, he added, I was driven to pursue.
	It was too trying to look on and see our men suffer so badly, being unable to retaliate.
	However, when we did charge, there is no denying the truth of what you say.
	We were not a whit more able to injure the enemy, while we had considerable difficulty in beating retreat ourselves.
	Thank heaven they did not come upon us in any great force, but we were only a handful of men, so that the injury they did us was not large, as it might have been, and at least has served to show us what we need.
	At present, the enemies shoot and sling beyond our range, so that our Cretan archers are no match for them, our hand throwers cannot reach as far, and when we pursue, it is not possible to push the pursuit any great distance from the main body, and within the short distance no foot soldier, however fleet of foot, could overtake another foot shot soldier who has a bow shot start ahead of him.
	If, then, we are to exclude from all possibility of them injuring us as we march, we must get slingers as soon as possible and cavalry.
	I am told in the army there are some Rhodians, most of whom they know how to sling, and their missile will reach even twice as far as the Persian slings.
	These proposals were carried, and that night two hundred slingers were enrolled.
	They marched one stage, four parasangs, but while still on this stage, Tisiphernes made his appearance.
	He had with him his own cavalry, a force belonging to Aurontus, who had the king's daughter to wife, and there were, moreover, with them, the Asiatics whom Cyrus had taken with him on his march up, together with those whom the king's brother had brought as reinforcement to the king.
	Besides those himself Tisiphernes had received as a gift from the king, so that the armament appeared to be very great.
	When they were close, he halted some of his regiments at the rear and wheeled others into position on either flank, but hesitated to attack, having no mind apparently to run any risks, and contenting himself with an order for his slingers to sling and his archers to shoot.
	But when the Rhodian slingers and the bowmen posted at intervals retaliated, and every shot told, Tisiphernes with all speed retired out of range, and the other regiments following suit, and for the rest of the day one party advanced and the other followed it.
	But now the Asiatics had ceased to be dangerous with their sharp shooting, for the Rhodians could reach further than the Persian slingers, or indeed most of the bowmen.

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