Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  The great Assyrian army camped at Pelusium, in the salt flats and flax fields along the northeastern border of Egypt, poised to overtake the kingdom. The Pharaoh, who was also a priest of the god Ptah, was desperate. Regretting his pride, “not knowing what else to do,” he entered the god’s temple and bemoaned “bitterly the peril that threatened him.” The Pharaoh fell asleep in the midst of his lamentations and the god appeared in a dream. Ptah instructed the Pharaoh to forget his warriors. Instead, he said, call up all the shopkeepers, craftsmen, and market folk into an army, and boldly go out to meet Sennacherib’s troops. The god promised to send “helpers” to ensure victory. Confident now, the Pharaoh marched with his ragtag legions to Pelusium and took up a position facing the enemy host.

  Night fell, and not a creature was stirring. . . . except for thousands of mice. Into the Assyrian camp crept multitudes of rodents, gnawing through all the leather quivers, shield straps, and bowstrings. The next morning the Assyrians were horrified to find they had no weapons to fight with. In antiquity, mice eating leather military gear was perceived as an omen of imminent disaster and, as already noted, hordes of rodents presaged epidemics. The terrible omen threw the men into chaos; the Assyrians abandoned camp and fled. The Egyptian ad hoc army pursued them, inflicting severe losses on Sennacherib’s men.

  Herodotus heard this tale personally from the priests at the temple of Ptah, who showed him a memorial statue of the Pharaoh holding a mouse, and historians believe that a core of historical truth lies behind Herodotus’s story. Archaeologists at Nineveh have found a series of inscriptions from Sennacherib’s reign recording his invasions of Egypt and Palestine. In these, the narrative of the war breaks off abruptly, implying that some sort of unexpected calamity took place during the campaign. Putting together the various literary and archaeological clues about the incident helps clarify what probably happened.

  Hebrew sources in the Old Testament also recount the sudden and ignominious defeat of Sennacherib’s army in about 700 BC, but they set the event at the gates of Jerusalem. According to 2 Kings, “an angel of the Lord smote 175,000 Assyrian soldiers”—traditional scriptural wording for plagues that destroyed the Israelites’ enemies. King Hezekiah, inside the walls of Jerusalem, was also struck by the pestilence.

  Josephus, a Jewish historian writing in AD 93, added to Herodotus’s account, saying that the omen of the gnawing mice was only one reason for the hasty retreat. According to Josephus’s sources, Sennacherib had also heard that a large Ethiopian army was coming to aid the Egyptians. Then, citing Berossus, a Babylonian historian (300 BC), Josephus plainly states that “a pestilential plague killed 185,000 Assyrians” as they retreated from Egypt through Palestine.

  Clearly, the Greek, Hebrew, Babylonian, and Assyrian evidence refers to a military campaign that was aborted after Sennacherib’s army was beset by disease-carrying rodents who, incidentally, ate the leather parts of their weapons at Pelusium. The bad omen and the rumor of the approaching Ethiopian army caused the Assyrians to abandon their invasion of Egypt and retreat through Palestine while the rodent-borne disease (perhaps bubonic plague or typhus) incubated in the men. As they arrived at Jerusalem, the epidemic swept through the troops, killing tens of thousands.1

  In the ancient world, mice and rats were believed to be controlled by plague-bringing divinities, such as Apollo, Ptah, and Yahweh. Apollo, the god who controlled pestilence, was worshipped as “Smintheus,” killer and master of rodents. Statues of mice were set up in Apollo’s temples at Chryse and Hamaxitus near Troy, and (as noted in the discussion of plague in chapter 4), the latter temple actually maintained a horde of live white mice. Three ancient Greek sources—the natural historian Aelian and the geographers Polemon and Strabo—tell the origin of the cult of Apollo’s pestilential mice. That ancient myth has intriguing parallels to the bio-disaster that befell the Assyrian army.

  Long ago, mice arrived by the tens of thousands and ruined the crops in the region around Troy. The rodents also overran the camp of an invading army from Crete, and ate all of their leather shield straps and bowstrings. With no weapons to wage war, the Cretans settled at Hamaxitus. They built the temple to Apollo, to honor the god of mice—lowly creatures who possess the power to take down entire armies.

  In ancient times, writers did not differentiate among types of rodents, all of which can harbor plague, typhus, and other diseases, so when mice were mentioned in the texts, rats may have been meant. The modern chronicler of rodent-borne epidemics, William Zinsser, remarked in 1934 that long before any scientific knowledge “concerning the dangerous character of rodents as carriers of disease, mankind dreaded and pursued these animals.” The ancient Jews considered all varieties of rodents unclean, and Persian Zoroastrians so loathed rats that killing them was “a service to God.”

  FIGURE 26. Rodents carry flea-borne bubonic plague and other epidemic diseases.

  (Dover Pictorial Archives)

  As Zinsser pointed out, “What rats can do, mice may also accomplish.” Yet, some modern scholars still take the ancient association of mice and epidemics as evidence of superstition rather than an understanding of a real source of pestilence based on observation. Apparently unaware that no distinction was made among rodents in ancient writings, and assuming that only mice were associated with disease in antiquity, some commentators assert that mice never carry bubonic plague. For example, the scholar of religion, Christopher Faraone, in his discussion of these ancient narratives in 1992, suggested that “faulty reasoning” about the “curious coincidence of swarming mice and man-killing plague” must have led the ancients to believe that vermin “cause epidemic disease.” Faraone labels this “a misunderstanding that arises from the frequency with which plague strikes close on the heels” of mouse infestations. In fact, however, science shows that pathogens are carried by the parasites (usually fleas) of rodents, which transmit the diseases to humans, and many ancient texts make it clear that periodic hordes of rodents of any sort were correctly recognized as harbingers of pestilence. The geographer Strabo remarked about infestations of vermin, “From mice pestilential diseases often ensue,” and during a rodent-borne plague that attacked the Roman army on campaign in Cantabria, Spain (first century BC), the commanders offered bounties on dead mice.

  Further proof that the ancients understood the connection between rodents and epidemics can be found in the Old Testament story of the Philistines who were smote by disease after they captured the Ark of the Covenant during the war with the Israelites in the twelfth century BC. In what may be the earliest account of rodent-borne bubonic plague, the Philistine lands were afflicted by an onslaught of mice that coincided with an epidemic marked by “swellings in the Philistines’ private places.” Assuming that mice were innocent of plague, some commentators cited by Faraone identified the “swellings” as hemorrhoids and they dismiss any connection with the concurrent mouse infestation. But, as pointed out earlier, a classic sign of the Black Death is grotesquely swollen lymph glands in the groin and thighs. And 1 Samuel 5-6 clearly indicates that the Philistines themselves recognized the connection between rodents and the disease.2

  The rodent hordes that afflicted the Philistines and averted the Assyrians’ invasion were natural disasters, since directing multitudes of infected rodents against the enemy would be nearly impossible. But the priests who prayed to their gods of pestilence for deliverance from foes by means of mice certainly intended to wage biological war, and when an enemy was routed by plague they credited the gods with the biological victory. The small creatures were considered zoological allies in war. In a striking continuity of the ancient cult of rodent allies, laboratory scientists rely on the very same “helpers” that were kept in Apollo’s temple—white mice and rats—to develop today’s germ warfare agents.

  Tales like Sennacherib’s military disaster are included in this chronicle of early bio-warfare because the long observed relationship between infestations of vermin and thwarted invasions suggested the idea of
praying to gods to send swarms of rodents, and probably gave people the idea of deliberately trying to turn other noxious creatures against enemies. And, in fact, as the following episodes show, a remarkable variety of creatures from the animal and insect world were recruited to achieve victory in the ancient world.

  Mice were not the smallest animal allies in waging biological war. One of the biblical Ten Plagues of Egypt was an infestation of lice that “bugged” both animals and humans (lice can carry typhus). That fortuitous infestation was attributed to Yahweh, but there is plenty of evidence from ancient texts that other insects, such as stinging bees, hornets, wasps, and scorpions (venomous arthropods), were purposefully used in wartime as agents for both offense and defense. Simply by doing what came naturally, these tiny creatures could inflict damage and chaos far beyond their bodily dimensions.

  Insects, with their sharp stingers, chemical poisons, and a propensity to defend and attack, have long “served as models for man to emulate in . . . the art of warfare,” commented the military historian and entomologist John Ambrose. Bees were admired in antiquity as producers of honey, but they were also respected as aggressive creatures “of exceedingly vicious disposition.” In one of the earlier examples of borrowing weapons from nature’s armory, we saw how a relatively primitive tribe in Asia Minor decimated Pompey’s Roman army by setting out toxic honeycombs. As Pliny noted, the baneful honey was the bees’ defensive weapon against human greed. But the honeybees themselves—and wasps and hornets (the largest species of wasps)—were armed with stingers. Swarms had been known to invade cities, forcing entire populations to relocate. Such a disaster had befallen the residents of Phaselis (central Turkey), and the people of Rhaucus, in Crete, had to abandon their city when copper-colored killer bees from Mount Ida arrived in great swarms.

  Why not hurl entire hives filled with enraged, venomous insects at an enemy? The painful stings would send any army into wild confusion and retreat, and massive numbers of stings could be fatal. According to folk belief cited by Pliny, it took only twenty-seven hornet stings to kill a man (in fact, even one sting can cause death in individuals who are sensitive to the venom).

  Beehive bombs were probably among the first projectile weapons and Edward Neufeld, a scholar of Mesopotamian history, surmises that hornets’ nests were lobbed at enemies hiding in caves as early as Neolithic times. Bees have figured in warfare in different cultures of many eras. The sacred text of the Maya in Central America, the Popol Vuh, for example, describes an ingenious bee boobytrap used to repel besiegers: dummy warriors outfitted in cloaks, spears, and shields were posted along the walls of the citadel. War bonnets were placed on the heads, which were actually large gourds filled with bees, wasps, and flies. As the assailants scaled the walls, the gourds were smashed. The furious insects honed in on the warriors, who were soon “dazed by the yellow jackets and wasps [and were sent] stumbling and falling down the mountainside.”3

  FIGURE 27. Wasp nests and beehives were hurled at enemies from Neolithic times onward.

  (Dover Pictorial Archives)

  Were hornets and other venomous insects marshaled to scourge the Israelites’ foes? Neufeld has written that in biblical times insects were “important military agents in tactics of ambush,” guerrilla raids, and flushing out primitive strongholds. He also noted that ancient Hebrew and Arab sources refer to hordes of unidentified flying insects that were summoned to attack the enemies’ eyes with “acrid poison fluids,” blinding or killing them. As Neufeld pointed out, these could belong to any of the dozens of species of noxious insects in the Near East. He suggested that the gadfly, or “eye fly,” may have been the unknown insect that ejected blinding poison. But thinking back to poisonous insect “droppings” of India described by Aelian (chapter 2), is it possible that these Near Eastern stories were about infestations of Paederus beetles? The beetles excrete the virulent poison pederin, a fluid that causes suppurating sores and blindness, and in the bloodstream the effect is as deadly as cobra venom. Plagues of Paederus beetles period-ically afflict populations in Africa and in the Mideast, but it is difficult to see how the swarms could ever have been directed effectively in a military campaign.

  FIGURE 28. A swarm of bees or hornets attacking men. Amphora from Vulci, about 550 BC.

  (© The British Museum)

  Some biblical passages cited by Neufeld do seem to suggest a planned military use of stinging insects. Exodus states that hornets were “sent ahead” of the Israelites to drive out the Canaanites, Hittites, and other enemies, and in Deuteronomy, hornets supplemented ordinary weapons against the Canaanites. In Joshua, hornets, in conjunction with swords or bows, drove out the Amorites. Proposing that these biblical narratives describe “massive assaults” with hornets’ nests, “plotted and contrived deliberately,” rather than spontaneous swarming insect behavior, Neufeld argued that the “texts clearly reflect an early form of biological warfare.” Even the “crudest forms” of such warfare, simply throwing beehive bombs by hand, could rout an enemy hiding in caves with stings and panic.

  Deploying stinging insects involved hazards for those who used them in war. The traditional practice of the Tiv people of Nigeria shows one clever method of directing bees at the enemy. The Tiv kept their bees in special large horns, which also contained a toxic powder. The poison dust was said to strengthen the bees’ venom, but it is possible that it was a drug to calm the bees in the horn. In the heat of battle, the bees were released from the horns toward the enemy. It was not recorded how the Tiv avoided stings themselves, but it seems that the shape and length of the horns effectively propelled the swarm toward the enemy ranks.

  Tossing beehive bombs at enemies also involved the potential for “blow-back.” Stinging insects had to be “kept peacefully in their nests before the ammunition was used against the foe; the danger of premature explosion must have been considerable.” To reduce “the chances of backfire,” noted Neufeld, buzzing bombs had to be “hurled carefully at the enemy, wherein the bursting nest would release hundreds of very nervous hornets on the target.” He suggests that hornets’ nests may have been plugged with mud and transported in sacks, baskets, and pots, or perhaps bees were persuaded to colonize special containers.

  One precaution against misdirected stings was smoke, which was recognized as a tranquilizer of bees very early in antiquity. Another method was to set up hives with trip wires along the enemy’s route, a method used by both sides in Europe in World War I. Obviously, a great deal of skill and a variety of releasing devices were required for the entire operation, and it is possible that beekeeping shamans were involved in stunning the hornets with smoke or toxic dust, and in planning the attacks.4

  There is historical evidence that the old strategy of hurling hives of stinging missiles at enemies continued to flourish even as more sophisticated methods of siege-craft were developed. Catapults, for example, were a very effective delivery system for launching biological weapons of all sorts—including hornets’ nests—while avoiding collateral damage. In fact, catapulting beehives at enemy troops became a favorite Roman tactic. In his survey of the use of bugs in battle from biblical times to the Vietnam War, John Ambrose even suggested that the Romans’ extensive use of bees in warfare may partly account for the recorded decline in number of hives in the late Roman Empire. Ambrose also pointed out that heaving hives continued in popularity in later times: for example, Henry I’s catapults lobbed beehives at the Duke of Lorraine’s army in the eleventh century, a tactic used again in 1289 by the Hungarians against the Turks. More recently, in the 1960s, the Vietcong set boobytraps with giant, ferocious Asian honeybees (Apis dorsata) against American soldiers. In retaliation, says Ambrose, the Pentagon began developing its own top-secret bee weapon to use against the Vietcong, based on the bees’ alarm chemical, a pheromone that marks victims for a swarming attack. Such weapons are, in 2003, still in the development stage.5

  As the ancient Maya and many others have recognized, bees could provide a very effecti
ve defense, too. Defenders of the medieval castle on the Aegean island of Astipalaia, for example, fended off pirate attacks by dropping their beehives from the parapets. In Germany in 1642, during the Thirty Years’ War, attacking Swedish knights were repulsed with beehive bombs. Armor protected the knights, but the clouds of stinging bees drove their horses crazy. In the same era, the village of Beyenburg (Bee-town) was named in honor of some quick-thinking nuns who overturned the convent hives to repel marauding soldiers. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935-36, Italian planes sprayed a fog of mustard gas that devastated civilians and the landscape. The Ethiopians’ only recourse was to drop beehives from ridges down onto the Italian tanks, terrorizing the drivers and causing crashes.

  Stinging insects certainly helped defend forts in antiquity. In the fourth century BC, Aeneas the Tactician, in his book “How to Survive under Siege,” advised “besieged people to release wasps and bees into tunnels being dug under their walls, in order to plague the attackers.” This same tactic was employed against the Romans in 72 BC by King Mithridates in Pontus, according to Appian of Alexandria (a historian of the second century AD). Appian relates that Licinius Lucullus (one of several Roman commanders who failed to capture the wily king) laid siege to Mithridates’ strongholds at Amisus on the Black Sea, and at Eupatoria and Themiscrya. Lucullus’s sappers excavated tunnels under the citadels, passageways so capacious that several subterranean battles were fought in them. But Mithridates’ allies routed the Romans by drilling holes that intersected the tunnels and releasing not only swarms of angry bees, but also bears and other rampaging wild beasts.6