Bolas used by ancient Inca

Residing in a mountainous terrain that yielded little wood, the Inca’s most effective weapons were stones, rolled down hills or hurled from slingshots. Stones thrown from slings were the common weapon that could be used from a distance.

Inc also threw bolas. Bolas is a type of throwing weapon made of weights on the ends of interconnected cords, which hurled at the legs of enemies to bring them to their enemies.

Bolas were most famously used by the gauchos or Argentinean cowboys but that have been found in excavations of Pre-Columbia settlements, especially in Patagonia, whore indigenous peoples used them to catch 200-pound guanaco (Ilamalike mammals) and nandu (birds).

They were also used in battle by the Mapuche and Inca army. Bolas were used extensively against the Spanish, especially to cripple their horses. When the bolas were spun around, then hurled, the stones encircled that arms or legs of an enemy.
Bolas used by ancient Inca 

War in History

War in History
War has been a sensational topic. Warfare concentrates and intensifies some of our strongest emotions; courage and fear, resignation and panic, selfishness and self-sacrifice, greed and generosity, patriotism and xenophobia.

The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism and cruelty.

It is the riskiest field on which to match wits and luck: no peaceful endeavor can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.

It remains the most theatrical of human activities combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce and even low comedy.

War displays the human condition in extremes.

It is thus not surprising that the first recovered histories, the first written accounts of the exploits of mortals, are military histories.

The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs record the victories of Egypt’s first pharaohs, the Scorpion King and Narmer.

The first secular literature or history recorded in cuneiform recounts the adventures of the Sumerian warrior king Gilgamesh.

The earliest written part of the Books f Moses, the “J-strand”, culminate in the brutal Hebrew conquest of Canaan.

The annals of the Chinese, Greeks, and Roman are concerned with wars and warrior king.

Most Mayan hieroglyphic texts are devoted to the genealogies, biographies and military exploits of Mayan kings.
War in History