Week 4: When Digital Resources Fall Short

Hello everyone and welcome to the fourth chapter of your favorite blog series, Battle Rams to Ballistas. My name is Aadrit T, and I will be your researcher guiding you through my project.

This week’s progress included me doing the unthinkable: going to a library. One of the key issues I found from researching online is that many of my sources fell into a middle zone. Too young to become public domain like my primary sources, and too old to be readily published online like articles and videos. Going to a physical library helps me bridge that gap. 

Over the course of the week, I made multiple trips to San Jose’s own Martin Luther King Jr. Library in search of the texts I needed. One of the key reasons I chose MLK is because it connected directly with SJSU, offering a wide array of academic sources for my research.

One helpful text was the Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization by Hornblower, Spawforth, and Eidinow. It essentially acts as a large dictionary-like source for all key terms in the Classical era. Using their entries on warfare and siege technology, I was able to find out how the siege technologies were used across the ages. In particular, sieges around the 4th century BCE by Greek tyrant Dionysius I included weapons similar to crossbows and stone throwers, supported with wooden frames and metal plating. This meant that higher power, torsion-based weapons like the Cheiroballistra could only be developed during the Roman era, where metalworking allowed for a complete metal frame.

Another helpful book was Civilization of the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece and Rome, edited by Michael Grant and Rachel Kitzinger. They provided much more support on the earlier end of the Classical era, which actually falls out of my original range. It covered how Assyrian-era sieges often relied on close combat siege warfare, which included large towers to scale walls and the famous battle rams to break down walls. In concurrent with the Oxford Companion, it showed how ranged weapons were introduced during Dionysius’s time and only got better as time went on. 

While these texts didn’t have the exact technical specifications I was dreaming of (even if they had great diagrams of all the civil engineering), they pointed me in the right direction.

I hope to spend one more week finishing out my literature study, which I foresee ending now that I found good points of comparison. I found interesting papers referenced in these texts, such as Eric Marsden’s “Greek and Roman Artillery: Technical Treatises”, from 1971, which I can only hope have the details I need. After that side is done, I’ll be taking you down Part 2 of this project, the engineering and modeling (the more exciting part, in my opinion).

Signing off,

Aadrit T

1. Hornblower, S., Spawforth, A., & Eidinow, E. (2019). The oxford companion to classical civilization. Oxford University Press, Credo Reference. 

    2. Grant, M., & Kitzinger, R. (1988). Civilization of the ancient mediterranean: Greece and Rome. Scribner’s.