Fire in Ancient Warfare (Greece

¶ … Fire in Ancient Warfare (Greece and Israel)

The cultivation of fire by early hominids was perhaps one of the seminal technological events leading towards true civilization. Fire allowed food to be cooked -- easier to eat, safer, storable; increased tool technology; increased defense against predation; and more efficient tools for hunting by hardening to points of wood spears. However, as is common with many technological advances, soon the use of fire moved from the hearth to the ability to make war in new and terrible ways.

However, warfare in the Ancient World was more a lengthy plan of attack, some fierce battles in which armies lined up to do battle, but also often a war of attrition in which one power or another, either from land or sea, hurled objects into the cities, towns, or ships to which they were fighting.

One of the most technological advanced forms of weaponry utilizing fire was an invention from the Eastern Roman Empire, ironically called "Greek Fire," yet it was certainly not Greek at all, but Byzantine. However, the term itself was probably used to indicate incendiary and flaming weapons of all kinds, including the sulfur-petroleum-based mixtures used in Ancient Greece and Rome (Crosby, 2002).

As early as the 9th century BC, incendiary arrows and pots were used extensively in the Greek world. Use of these weapons is even mentioned by Greek historian Thucydides, explaining the tubed flame-throwers in the siege of Delium (424 BC)

. And even Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father, developed larger, more efficient projectile machines that could fire burning ammunition long distances. The Greeks called them katapultos, they are now known as catapults (Wood, 2000, p. 74). We also have evidence that a sulfur-based mixture was used in 513 AD by Roman/Byzantinian Emperor Anastasius I, under the advice of an Athenian philosopher, Proculus (Partington, p. 6).

In the 19th year of the War with Syracuse, one of the first recorded uses of fire in a naval battle has the Syracusan troops setting fire to specialized ships (rafts) build with wooden pyres and filled with pinesap, set on fire, and let to drift down and hit the Athenian ships (Thucydides, 2007, p. 391).

Siegcraft was the most logical area in which fire was used; Greeks would pour pitch and sulfur on siege towers, set them alight, and push toward city walls. and, in an early book on warfare called "Siegecraft" (Poliogreitke), the military historian Aeneas the Tactician gives rules on using fire, both offensively and defensively. As a defense, interestingly enough, his advice is:

The defenders should cover all flammable points of access with felt (and keep it wet), but if the enemy do manage to set the gates on fire, the defenders should feed the fire and keep it so hot that it will hold the enemy at bay while the defenders dig a trench and build a defensive wall. They should demolish nearby houses if necessary. Defenders can extinguish fires with vinegar, but they are better advised to smear flammable surfaces with bird lime (which won't burn) (Aenas in Bradford, 2000, p.104).

In Ancient Israel, the use of fire is also part of the tradition of warfare. For example, we are not sure whether the prophet Elijah is stating that the fire hurled against the Moabites is divine, or simply falls down upon the enemy from Israelite war machines: "If I am a man of God," Elijah replied, "may fired come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men!" Then the fire of God fell from heaven and consumed him and his fifty men (2 Kings 1:12, New International Version).