Week 5: My Final Step of Literature Research

Hello everyone and welcome back to another installment of your favorite blog series, Ballistas to Battle Rams. You already know me, so let’s jump right into the research.

When I say I’ve found my Holy Grail, that is no understatement. E.W Marsden’s “Greek and Roman Artillery – Technical Treatise” is where all of my background research and studying has led me. 

Marsden’s research was mainly centered around artillery and siege warfare, similar to what my own interests are around. His paper centers around translating the workbooks of ancient engineers, like Heron of Alexandria and Vitruvius of Rome. In a fashion similar to loebs, one half is the text in its original language, say Ancient Greek or Latin, and the other is the translated version. 

These workbooks have almost all the information I have been looking for, including the dimensions of the different pieces, how the mechanisms themselves work, as well as preliminary diagrams based on ancient descriptions. 

Just starting out after getting the text, I’ve been reading through the section of Heron’s Artillery manual. His descriptions go into full geometric diagrams of the bow structures of a ballista-like object, detailing the exact geometry of many of the pieces. Additionally, he goes much into detail about how they discovered the methods for torsion-based launching, and where the supposed tension strings must lie on the entire machine. 

With the entire text being so dense, I am still parsing through it. But while I’m doing that, I’ll mention a few questions and important answers I had while reading.

Number 1: It’s been thousands of years. How do I know the measurements and ratios? 

Answer: One of the very helpful facets of Marsden’s paper is that it includes a section that converts the Graecian units of πούς (feet) and dactyls to millimeters and inches. The same also applies to Roman Pes and digitus, as well as units of weight for both. An interesting side tangent is how both Ancient Greeks and Romans used a unit of measurement that had a name closely related to feet, etymologically. 

Number 2: How will I scale my project?

In terms of scaling, it will largely be based on the space I have to work with and test. I may have to go all the way down to toothpicks, or I may pull off 1:2 ratios. If materials may cost too much, I will also have to consider going smaller instead. 

Engineering pictures coming soon,

Signing off,

Aadrit T