5 Siege Engines That Meant It Was Over for Your Precious Walls

5 Battering Ram

Just because a solution is straightforward doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. In fact, sticking with the classics can save everyone involved a lot of headaches. So, when ancient peoples needed to knock something down, it probably didn’t take too long for them to grab a big log and start wailing on it. 

Infinitely more effective than a dozen men individually punching a wall, combining their force through a rhythmic, focused strike was a quick path to the other side of the barrier in question. Improvements popped up around the core mechanic, like beams to hang the ram from, letting all the attackers’ physical exertion be focused exclusively forward. Or coverings called “tortoises,” or testudo, that prevented the defenders from throwing shit, often heavy, on fire, or both, at and onto the ram. 

My personal favorite development perfectly demonstrates humans’ love for a good bit — a literal ram-shaped metal endcap.

4 Lithobolos

The inclusion of any number of ballista-like weapons would have been natural here, but I wanted to go slightly off-the-beaten path. There’s one ballista-style weapon I find particularly fun, because of how it combines ingenuity and laziness. See, your traditional ballista throws bolts, or gigantic arrows that have to be manufactured, which seems both time-consuming and a huge pain in the ass, given that they’re just getting shot into a wall in the end. 

So the Ancient Greeks looked at the mechanism of the ballista and thought, “Fuck it, why not just shove rocks in there?” This was the lithobolos, or “stone-thrower.” There’s records of these being aimed and fired at opposing structures as far back as 334 B.C., under the command of Alexander the Great. The standard payload was a 30-pound rock, but the most powerful could hurl a hunk of wall-hating geology weighing over 150 pounds.

3 Siege Hook

So far, we’ve looked at two very effective strategies for a siege, both of which are, in essence, a pushing force. At some point in antiquity, though, people began to wonder: What if they could not only push at their enemies, but pull them? From this thought came the yin to the battering ram’s yang, the siege hook. 

A fairly straightforward name gives you some idea what we’re talking about here. It was a gigantic hook that could be used to, well, hook onto opposing walls, structures or even individuals, and yank them forward or apart. They were even used in tandem with battering rams, as recorded by Greek historian Polybius. While the rams were slamming into the walls’ base, the siege hooks were ripping them down from the top. 

Basically, the walls were just getting high-lowed to absolute smithereens.

2 Helepolis

There was, of course, one serious downside to any siege weapon intended to be used up close and personal — namely, you’d be right below a bunch of people who were incredibly pissed off that you were fucking with their walls. Thus, ancient defense contractors got to work on ways to protect the sweet, fragile skulls of the siege engine operators. One particularly impressive device was the Helepolis, or “taker of cities,” built by Demetrius around 305 B.C. 

Unfortunately, “impressive” and “effective” are two different words. The helepolis was a hell of a sight, a multi-story, iron-plated tower with weapons mounted throughout, almost like an unwieldy tank of yore. So why didn’t it work? Well, you try to wheel that behemoth, which takes 3,600 men to push, up to a wall. They see it coming, and they realize that it’s priority one. 

The Rhodians that were under attack immediately went at the Helepolis like their lives depended on it, which they did. They managed to rip off its protective armor, at which point, Demetrius panicked and ordered them to bring it back, and it was eventually abandoned. Way to strike fear into your enemies, my guy.

1 Sambuca

You might be the smartest type of ruler, the one that realizes that an extra layer of security would be provided by building your headquarters flanked by the sea. Especially considering that cannons weren’t around yet, what were they going to do, pop a catapult on a raft? 

One device that you might see coming your way from the sea with bad intentions was the Roman sambuca. A device that doesn’t appear to be the product of many long nights of deep thought. It was a gigantic ladder attached to two boats, which the attackers would try to pull up and drop onto your seaside wall. 

Obviously, fighting your way up a ladder onto a defended stronghold isn’t a particularly advantageous position, as demonstrated repeatedly in the movie Home Alone, and the sambuca wasn’t much more effective than the Wet Bandits.