Spear

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  A spear is one of the simplest weapons ever built, a pointed head fixed to a shaft, and it may also be one of the oldest. Near Kedougou, Senegal, researchers have watched western chimpanzees break straight limbs from trees, strip the bark and side branches, and sharpen one end with their teeth, then use the finished tool to hunt galagos sleeping in tree hollows. Humans were doing something similar hundreds of thousands of years before written history began. How old is the spear really, and how did a sharpened stick evolve into the sarissa, the bayonet, and the ceremonial half-pike? The head of a spear can simply be the fire-hardened tip of the shaft itself, or it can be a separate piece of bone, flint, obsidian, copper, bronze, iron, or steel lashed to the end. Spears split broadly into two kinds: those built for thrusting in close combat, like the lance and the pike, and those built for throwing, generally called javelins. This is the story of a weapon so basic that chimpanzees invented a version of it too, and so adaptable that it outlived nearly every rival for tens of thousands of years.

• 2. Deep Prehistory

  ›

  In England, the Clacton Spear and, in Germany, the Schoningen spears document that fully wooden spears have been used for hunting since at least 400,000 years ago, likely to kill horses at Schoningen. A 120,000-year-old spear from Lehringen, Germany, made by Neanderthals, was found alongside the butchered skeleton of a large straight-tusked elephant it was presumably used to kill. A 2012 study of the Kathu Pan site in South Africa suggests that hominids, possibly Homo heidelbergensis, may have developed hafted stone-tipped spears in Africa around 500,000 years ago. Because wood decays quickly and rarely survives in the archaeological record, primatologist Craig Stanford of the University of Southern California has argued that the discovery of spear-making chimpanzees suggests early humans may have used wooden spears even earlier than the surviving evidence shows. From around 200,000 BC, Middle Paleolithic humans began producing complex stone blades with flaked edges to serve as spearheads, fixed to shafts with gum, resin, or bindings of sinew, leather, or plant fiber. By the Magdalenian period, roughly 15,000 to 9,500 BC, spear-throwers similar to the later atlatl were already in use, and hunters were also fitting wooden and bone launchers to their spears by 15,000 BC, often carving them with images of animals. The English word spear itself traces back through the Old English spere and the Proto-Germanic speri to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning simply "spear, pole".

• 3. Greek And Roman Warfare

  ›

  Homer's Iliad makes the spear the primary weapon of its warriors, describing both a single thrusting spear and a pair of throwing spears, which scholars read as evidence of two overlapping combat styles from different eras. In the 7th century BC, the Greeks developed the phalanx, a close-order infantry formation built around the hoplite, who carried a large bronze-faced round shield called an aspis and a spear seven to nine feet long, tipped with an iron head and a bronze butt-spike, called a doru. That hoplite phalanx dominated warfare among the Greek city-states from the 7th century BC into the 4th. The 4th century brought two major shifts: the wider use of peltasts, light infantry armed with spear and javelins, and the development of the sarissa, an 18-foot two-handed pike introduced by the Macedonians under Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great. Rome took a different path. Its early legions fought with the gladius sword and the pilum, a heavy javelin designed to pierce and foul an enemy's shield; the principes had originally carried a short spear called the hasta before switching to the gladius, while the triarii kept using the hasta. From the late 2nd century BC, all legionaries carried the pilum, which remained standard until the end of the 2nd century AD. By the 4th century it had disappeared from common use, but as barbarian cavalry became a bigger threat, the spear returned to Roman use for its effectiveness against mounted attackers.

• 4. The Medieval Spear And Lance

  ›

  After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the spear and shield remained the core weapon set of nearly every Western European culture, in large part because a spear needed only a small amount of steel along its edges, with most of the tip made of wrought iron. That made it cheaper to produce than a sword and easier to master, which kept it the standard weapon of the ordinary soldier; the Vikings, despite their reputation for axes and swords, were armed mostly with spears, as were their Anglo-Saxon, Irish, and continental neighbors. Researcher M. J. Swanton identified thirty distinct spearhead categories and sub-categories in early Saxon England alone, most of them leaf-shaped, alongside specialized types like the angon, a Frankish and Anglo-Saxon throwing spear resembling the Roman pilum, and the winged spear, whose two prominent lugs kept the weapon from penetrating too deep. Average infantry spear length ran roughly six to eight feet, though the Scots and the Flemish were noted for using longer ones; William Wallace arranged his schiltrons in a circle at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298 to hold off cavalry, while Thomas Randolph, 1st Earl of Moray, used a circular schiltron on the first day of the Battle of Bannockburn and King Robert the Bruce used a more common rectangular one on the second. In the 12th century, the adoption of stirrups and high-cantled saddles let a mounted knight couch a lance under the armpit, focusing the full momentum of horse and rider on the tip, a technique that eventually gave rise to the medieval sport of jousting. By the 14th century, knights increasingly fought on foot, and lances were shortened to around five feet to make them more manageable.

• 5. Spears Across Asia And Africa

  ›

  In Chinese martial arts, the qiang, or spear, is known as the "king of weapons" and is listed alongside the staff, the sabre-like dao, and the double-edged jian as one of the Four Weapons. Its predecessor, the mao, first appeared in bronze form during the Shang dynasty, and by the end of the Han dynasty iron mao heads had entirely replaced bronze ones; after the Tang dynasty, the mao itself was overtaken by the qiang, which Tang sources divided into four categories based on the wood used to make the shaft. Despite the arrival of firearms, spears stayed in use with the Qing Army into the late 19th century, when 40 percent of imperial soldiers in the First Sino-Japanese War lacked rifles or even muskets, and Chinese Red Army guerrillas still carried spears against Japanese occupation forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In Japan, the naginata, a glaive-like weapon with a long curved blade, was favored by samurai and Buddhist warrior-monks against cavalry, while the straight-bladed yari became the weapon of choice for both samurai and footmen, or ashigaru, during the Warring States era. In India, mounted spear-fighting was practiced with a ten-foot, ball-tipped wooden lance called a bothati, its tip dyed to mark confirmed hits, and the Maratha Army used the vita, a corded lance tethered to the user's wrist so it could be thrown and pulled back. Across South Africa, the Zulu, Xhosa, and other Nguni peoples were known for using a light spear or javelin called the assegai; Shaka of the Zulu invented a shorter stabbing version with a one-foot shaft and a blade a foot long, called the iklwa, named for the sound it made when withdrawn from a wound.

• 6. The Az-Zaghayah And Gunpowder

  ›

  Muslim warriors carried a spear known as the az-zaghayah, called za-gaya by the Berbers and rendered in English, by way of Old French and Berber, as "assegai." Forged with a hard wood haft and a pointed, forged iron tip, it played an important role during the Islamic conquest and remained in use well into the 20th century, including as a weapon of choice during the Fulani jihad and the Mahdist War in Sudan, and it is still carried today by certain wandering Sufi ascetics known as Derwishes. Farther east, the spear proved just as decisive in a single, famous encounter: at the Battle of Mactan in 1521, the chieftain Lapu-Lapu of Cebu led Filipino forces armed with sibat, or spears, against Spanish troops commanded by Ferdinand Magellan, who was killed in the fighting. In Renaissance Europe, the rise of the long two-handed pike alongside gunpowder firearms pushed infantry tactics toward tighter integration, while cavalry at the start of the period remained mostly lance-armed, split between heavily equipped gendarmes and lighter horsemen. That balance shifted by the 1540s, when pistol-armed cavalry known as reiters began appearing on European battlefields, and by the start of the 17th century, cavalry carrying pistols, lighter firearms, and swords had largely replaced lance-armed horsemen across Western Europe.

• 7. Hunting And The Americas

  ›

  Native Americans typically built spears from a wooden shaft topped with a head fashioned from stone arrowheads, sharpened copper, or bone. To kill buffalo, hunters used the buffalo pound method, in which one hunter disguised as a buffalo lured the herd into a ravine where others waited in hiding, or the buffalo jump, in which a runner drove the animals toward a cliff where hidden tribe members startled them over the edge while others speared them at the bottom. In Mesoamerica, where advanced metalworking was largely absent outside Western Mexico and South America, most spears were made of wood or obsidian, a volcanic glass that can be sharpened far beyond the edge of steel; the Aztecs favored the sword-like macuahuitl in close combat but still carried the tepoztopilli, a polearm roughly the height of a man edged with obsidian blades set into carved grooves. Early human hunters targeted megafauna such as mammoths with spears, and one theory for the Quaternary extinction event holds that overhunting with spears drove many of these large animals to extinction. Spear hunting fell out of favor across most of Europe by the 18th century but experienced a revival in Germany in the 1930s and remains practiced in the United States today, mostly for wild boar and deer, though hunters have taken trophy animals as large as Cape buffalo; in Florida, alligators are hunted with a type of harpoon. Some hunting spears were built with a crossbar beneath the blade, called a barred spear, meant to stop the shaft from penetrating an animal too deeply; the design dates to the Bronze Age, though the earliest written account of its use comes from the 5th century BC writings of the Greek historian Xenophon.

• 8. Symbol And Myth

  ›

  Beyond the battlefield, the spear carried symbolic weight across many cultures. The Celts would deliberately destroy a dead warrior's spear, either to keep it from falling into other hands or as a sacrificial offering, while Romans forced captured prisoners to walk beneath a "yoke of spears," three weapons arranged so the captives had to stoop, a humiliation some scholars believe originated as a way to trap evil spirits. In Norse mythology, the god Odin owned a spear named Gungnir, forged by the sons of Ivaldi, which never missed its mark; during the War with the Vanir, Odin symbolically threw Gungnir into the enemy host, a gesture some historical armies later imitated at the start of real battles to invoke his favor. Sir James George Frazer, writing in The Golden Bough, argued that Arthurian legend cast the spear or lance as a phallic symbol of male fertility, paired with the Grail as a symbol of its female counterpart. The Hindu god of war, Murugan, is worshipped by Tamils in the form of his primary weapon, a spear called the Vel. Named legendary spears recur across traditions: Gae Bulg, carried by the Irish hero Cuchulainn; the Holy Lance, said to have pierced the side of Jesus; and Rhongomyniad, called simply Ron, or "spear," in Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of King Arthur. By the time gunpowder cavalry replaced the lance in Western Europe near the start of the 17th century, the weapon's last practical form was the half-pike, or spontoon, a shortened pike that officers carried less as a weapon than as a badge of office, one that stayed in use aboard ships as a boarding pike into the late 19th century.