Unthinkable new find inside Pompeii could change everything

News.com.au

31-05-2025

A scattering of pock marks on Pompeii's city walls may prove a mythological 'super weapon' may have been real after all.
At a glance, they look like acts of vandalism found across the ancient world – from the face of the Great Sphynx to the great standing stones of Britain.
Few historic sights have escaped the temptation of trigger-happy troops, hunters and tourists. And the marks of these bullet impacts still mar their surfaces centuries later.
But researchers examining the scars of battle in Pompeii 's stone walls near the city's main gates for the Vesuvius and Herculaneum roads have found similar depressions.
Only the can't have been caused by bullets.
Pompei was buried under volcanic debris as Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD. Gunpowder was first used in handheld weapons 900 years later, in China.
So what were these tightly grouped clusters of diamond-shaped impressions?
They were too small to be ancient artillery. And too deep to be caused by hand-drawn bows.
University of Campania researcher Adriana Rossi has found the impact marks in Pompeii's excavated walls are unlike anything ever seen before.
And only one mythological device could have caused them.
Forensic evidence
The University of Campania academics scanned the impact points in 3D and digitally reconstructed the properties of the stone wall. Their models of the trajectories and penetration depths suggest the heavy iron points that caused them must have been travelling at about 109 meters per second.
The deep gouges were in groups of four or five. And their even spacing suggests they were fired together, or in very close succession.
Only one weapon known from ancient writings could produce such results.
This is the polybolos, a 'machinegun' style crossbow-like weapon invented by the Greeks during the 3rd Century BC.
But the polybolos was an antipersonnel weapon. Not a wall breaching device.
The study argues the marks in the wall were made when the iron bolts fell slightly short of their intended targets. The 'gunners' would have simply upped their aim, and fired again.
The evidence fits the known history of Pompeii.
A century before being buried, it had been besieged.
The free city had rebelled against the growing power of Rome.
Its citizens wanted to restore their independence. But the famous Roman general, Sulla, was sent to quell the insurrection in 89BC.
Surviving accounts tell how he attacked Pompeii 's port with 'artillery', generally thought to be catapults and large ballistae (heavy bolt throwers).
General Sulla entered Pompeii once the walls were breached. The surviving defenders quickly capitulated, and the city was formally annexed as part of the Roman Republic.
Most of its citizens were granted citizenship. And many of the Roman legionaries involved in the siege were gifted properties in and around the city.
A century later, the coastal city had become a holiday resort for Rome's rich and famous.
From myth to reality
It's not entirely certain how the ancient 'machine gun' worked. No surviving example has ever been discovered.
But a description of its mechanics is contained in the writings of Philo of Byzantium (Philo Mechanicus). This inventor lived in the Greek city of Alexandria, the location of history's greatest library, in about 250BC. Its university was a boiling pot of philosophy, science and engineering.
Philo embraced the emerging concept of physics. He is credited with some of the earliest examples of automation and robotics. And his writings included treatises on leverage (The Mochlica) and the design of siege engines (The Belopoeica).
The polybolos (which, in Greek, means 'many-shot-thrower') relied on torsion (the springlike power of tightly twisted cords bending timber) as its power source.
Up to 15 bolts (large arrows) were stored in a magazine above the device. These were successively fed into the crossbow-like firing mechanism by a gear-driven chain-drive – the first known example of its kind.
All the user had to do was pull a trigger, and the stored torsion power could unleash several volleys of bolts. Once expended, torsion energy could be restored by winding a windlass winch and the magazine reloaded.
It was the most complex weapon system of its time.