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"Evolution
of Weaponry"
A
Brief Survey of Weapons Evolution
The
Phalanx
One limitation of the chariot (and later of cavalry) is
that horses consistently refuse to hurl themselves into
a hedge of sharp, projecting objects such as a phalanx,
with its deep ranks of tightly packed men carrying 4-meter
spears and protecting themselves with overlapping shields.
The Greek phalanx required a high degree of training and
organization, but starting around the 4th century B.C.,
the Greek city-states were able to use it to negate the
impact of the chariot in battle. The tightly packed ranks
of the phalanx created a group process that apparently permitted
it to act as a vast, crew-served weapon. This factor, along
with some distance (through the long spears) and the simplicity
and economic viability of the phalanx, made it the dominant
weapon system of its era. These aspects of the phalanx combined
with the later Greek mastery of horseback riding (albeit
absent stirrups) in order to approach an enemy from vulnerable
flanks and to exploit pursuits permitted the Greek to conquer
a vast portion of the world.
The
Greeks were defeated by the Romans, but the inherent simplicity
of the phalanx combined with its psychological fundamentals
were so powerful that after the fall of the Roman Empire
the phalanx again became ascendant, with the Swiss achieving
the epitome of perfection of the phalanx in the Middle Ages
and early Renaissance. The armies of the early gunpowder
era continued to use phalanx formations of pikemen combined
with formations of primitive, early muskets. The pikemen
were replaced with the advent of the bayonet, which made
every man a potential pikeman, and a remnant of the psychological
dynamics of the phalanx could be seen in the great, column-based
bayonet charges of Napoleon's armies.
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