Early iron swords were no better than bronze; horses changed war instead
When ironworking reached Greece around 1300 BC, the first iron swords were no improvement on bronze ones. The bigger military shift had come centuries earlier, around 2000 BC, when domesticated horses and spoked wheels gave armies speed and reach that no new blade could match.
A weapon is any tool used to deter, threaten, damage or kill, from a rock or bottle picked up in anger to firearms, tanks, missiles and engineered germs. Something converted into a tool of war is called weaponised, as with a weaponised virus or laser. Because users adapt to each other's weapons by learning, weapon use has fed a constant arms race in technology, skill and thinking, and has been a major engine of cultural evolution.
Chimpanzees use objects as weapons, prompting speculation that early hominins did so five million years ago, but wooden clubs and unshaped stones leave an ambiguous record. The earliest clear examples are the Schöningen spears, eight wooden throwing spears more than 300,000 years old. Metal weapons began with copper around 3300 BC and continued into the Bronze Age, which also brought the first fortifications and, by 2500 BC, the battering ram to break them.
Once horses were bred strong enough to carry riders, cavalry extended the range and pace of attacks. Warships such as the trireme sailed by the seventh century BC, and advanced vessels helped Rome defeat Carthage in the First Punic War. Medieval European battle revolved around mounted knights charging with lances, backed by mass infantry, while similar tactics developed independently further east.
Gunpowder, arriving from Asia, overturned that order. Musketeers guarded by pikemen came to dominate open battle, cannon displaced the trebuchet, and the Ottomans used artillery to wreck much of Constantinople's defences. Firearms differ fundamentally from earlier weapons because they release chemical energy quickly and repeatably instead of relying on a spring or counterweight. From the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, muscle-powered weapons gave way to guns, and industrial warfare became a cycle of rapid innovation, copying and counter-innovation.
Source: Weapon
