As I mentioned in my last Travel Tuesday post, I recently visited the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London. It's absolutely chock full of great artifacts and doesn't have the crowds of the much better-known British Museum.
Here you can see a sling that may have been used for hunting or war. The dirty one is the original , alongside a reproduction and the loom on which the repro was made. In the right hands, a sling was a deadly weapons. Soldiers didn't wear much armor beyond a shield in those days, and so were vulnerable to a stone flying at them at high speed. I made myself a sling when I was a boy and while I never got very accurate with it, I could throw with a dangerous amount of force. Imagine what an ancient soldier could have done!
For a bunch more Egyptology pics, check out my article on the museum at Black Gate.
2 comments:
Slings were used for a very long time and David knocked out Goliath with one.
Very cool. I'm a big fan of the sling as an ancient weapon. With a long sling in the hands of one of the famed Baleric slingers, a lead sling bullet was deadly at quite a long range, especially as the bows of the ancient world weren't the huge monstrosities of the late Medieval period. From what I've read of the ancient sources, slingers using lead shot could out-range archers, and the impacts could be devastating.
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