Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs

by Adrienne Mayor

  FIGURE 38 In antiquity the deposits of seeping, gushing, and flaming oil deposits from Baku to Persia were known as the “lands of the naphtha fountains.” Here, Alexander’s Greek soldiers watch local people gathering naphtha in Babylonia.

  (Painting by Bob Lapsley/ Aramco Services/PADIA)

  Burning naphtha could easily destroy siege engines, but unlike fire arrows aimed at wooden walls, liquid petroleum incendiaries seem to have been chiefly intended to burn humans alive, re-creating the mythical deaths of Hercules, Glauke, and Creon, and causing extreme suffering and injury for real-life soldiers. Plutarch, Pliny, and Seneca, the historians who identified naphtha as Medea’s secret weapon, based their speculation on firsthand accounts of liquid-fire weapons from Roman army veterans who had seen action in Asia in the first century BC. The armies that pursued Mithridates and his allies, from the Black Sea to Mesopotamia, were the first Romans to experience naphtha attacks, which continued over the next two centuries as the emperors attempted to maintain their rule in the Middle East.

  Hatra was one of many Mesopotamian strongholds that relied on nearby petroleum seepages to defend itself against Rome. Ammianus Marcellinus described the lakes of naphtha found in the region (now the rich oil fields of northern Iraq). The liquid was prodigiously sticky, he said, with heavy, “mortally noxious fumes.” Once it begins to burn, “human intelligence will find no other means of quenching it other than covering it with earth.”

  In AD 199, as we saw in chapter 6, Severus’s soldiers at Hatra were assailed by a gauntlet of terror weapons, including scorpion bombs and streams of burning naphtha. Because of its invisible but highly flammable fumes, the naphtha appeared to jump toward any spark, igniting the intervening air, and it was so sticky that it pursued anyone who tried to flee. Once again, water offered no hope, but fed the flames of intense heat. According to Dio Cassius, at Hatra the cascades of burning naphtha “inflicted the greatest damage, consuming the engines and all the soldiers on whom it fell.” A horrified Severus gave the order to retreat even as his men breached Hatra’s walls.20

  Conventional weapons of antiquity—arrows, spears, and swords—wounded or killed by penetrating the skin and damaging internal organs. One could depend on skill, courage, and armor for protection. But there was almost no way to prepare for or deflect weapons of fire. Ordinary fire was bad enough, causing severe injury or death from smoke inhalation and the destruction of skin—measured in degree (depth) and extent of burns over body surface. But fire weapons fueled by exothermic chemicals, because of their adhering nature and extremely high temperatures, intensified the degree of destruction of skin, deep tissue, and even bone, and prolonged the victim’s death or else inflicted torturous pain and lifelong injuries. For all these reasons, incendiary weapons have been considered exceptionally cruel and abhorrent.21

  By the time of Muhammad, in the seventh century AD, naphtha projectiles had become favored siege weapons in the Middle East. Interestingly, in some Arabic, Persian, and Mongol traditions and treatises on military incendiaries, Alexander the Great (and his “grand vizier,” the philosopher Aristotle, Alexander’s teacher and friend) was credited with the invention of several infernal naphtha fire weapons. Two of those naphtha legends were recounted in the Shahnama epic by the Persian poet Firdawsi (AD 940-1020).

  According to one legend, while in India Alexander forged thousands of life-sized horses and riders of hollow iron on wheels, each filled with naphtha. When these were rolled toward Porus’s war elephants, the eerie black metal figures spewed streams of fire (apparently ignited by a fuse or quicklime and water, since naphtha alone is not self-lighting). A dramatic color illustration of this battle appears in the elaborate Mongol version of the Shahnama. The tale is a curious combination of the old Homeric myth of the Trojan Horse and the later Greek legend of Alexander’s red-hot bronze statues deployed against Porus’s war elephants. In the other illustrated legend of Alexander’s ingenious inventions of chemical weaponry, Alexander constructed an invincible double wall of iron and copper, and filled it with charcoal, sulphur, and naphtha. When savage tribes attacked, the naphtha inside the wall could be ignited, to produce a shield of awesome flames and heat.22

  FIGURE 39. According to legend, Alexander the Great created a naphtha-spewing iron cavalry, to rout King Porus of India and his war elephants. This illustration is from the Great Il-Khanid Shahnama manuscript, AD 1330-40.

  (Courtesy of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gift of Edward W. Forbes)

  The first use of catapulting naphtha by an Islamic army reputedly occurred during one of Muhammad’s last campaigns, in AD 630. At the siege of Ta’if, a fortified city in the mountains east of Mecca held by the pagan Thaqif tribe, Muhammad ordered a catapult attack with fire. The Thaqif responded with catapult fire that rained red-hot scraps of metal on Muhammad’s army, a reprise of the catapult loads of red-hot sand and shrapnel first used by the Phoenicians against Alexander the Great’s men besieging Tyre, more than a thousand years earlier.

  In the civil wars after the death of Muhammad (AD 632), a specialized siege machine for delivering naphtha bombs was mentioned for the first time by name in Muslim annals. Created for the Umayyad caliph in Damascus (Syria), the manjaniq or mangonel was a heavy-duty catapult designed to bombard cites with blazing naphtha. Prototypes were reportedly first manned at the siege of Alexandria in AD 645, but the mangonels saw massive use in AD 683, when the Umayyad army set out to take Medina and Mecca. In Damascus, the soldiers loaded a camel caravan with great numbers of the heavy catapults and many containers of volatile naphtha, and accomplished the astonishing feat of crossing the searing Nafud Desert in high summer to make surprise attacks on the two holy cities.

  In AD 813, Baghdad, the Islamic capital, was totally destroyed by a new type of special forces—naphtha troops called naffatun, who manned hundreds of mangonels catapulting thousands of barrels of liquid fire. By AD 850, every Islamic army maintained regular naffatun units, and they were now protected by special fireproof uniforms and padding. Their gear was woven of the mysterious substance they called hajar al-fatila, asbestos, the fibrous rock impervious to flame that had been discovered by Muslims, in Tajikhstan, in the 800s. The invention of the fireproof uniforms led to a novel form of Islamic psychological warfare that brought Alexander’s legendary naphtha-filled iron horses and riders to life. In an innovation worthy of today’s Hollywood stuntmen on fire, Muslim riders and horses were covered with asbestos padding and then doused in naphtha and set afire to terrify the enemy cavalry.

  In AD 1167, an extreme example of the “scorched earth” policy of denying resources to an invading army occurred. In this case, when Cairo faced attack by Frankish Crusaders, the Muslims used their petroleum weapons to destroy their own city. As the Crusaders advanced across Egypt, the Islamic ruler turned the entire city into a raging inferno in order to leave nothing but rubble for the Christians. As the terrified populace fled, twenty thousand naphtha pots and ten thousand petroleum bombs were ignited and flames engulfed the city for fifty-four days.

  FIGURE 40. Naphtha grenades. These ceramic pots were filled with volatile naphtha, lit with a fuse, and hurled at the enemy.

  (Painting by Bob Lapsley/Aramco Services/PADIA)

  This historical incident shows that enormous stockpiles of volatile petrochemical weapons were stored in military warehouses in the Middle East at a surprisingly early date. The actions of desperate Cairo during the Crusades set a precedent for the threat, anticipated by U.S. intelligence in 2003, that Saddam Hussein might torch Iraq’s fifteen hundred oil wells, in order to deny them to U.S. invaders. In the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam’s retreating Iraqi troops had set fire to 650 oil fields in Kuwait, creating fires of stupendous magnitude that burned for eight months.

  Archaeological evidence of the destruction of Cairo by its own chemical weapons surfaced in 1916, when French and Egyptian archaeologists began to uncover troves of the ceramic, fist-sized naphtha pots in the ruins o
f the old city. The grenades were of astonishing sophistication: they had been filled with volatile jellied naphtha (similar to napalm) and a crude gunpowder made of nitrates and sulphur.23

  The dangers of backfire for the early users of weaponry based on pyrophoric chemicals were daunting. As Kautilya remarked in his discussion of how to use incendiaries to capture cities: “Fire cannot be trusted.” In the case of quicklime, sulphur, and petroleum, ensuring safety in collecting and storing the combustible substances was difficult, because volatile vapors and liquids had to be kept away from moisture, oxygen, heat, and sparks. (Notably, Medea had followed these precautions in treating the combustible gown, by sealing it in an airtight container.) During the chaos of battle, one had to mix the unstable, sticky materials, and ignite and aim them at the enemy, without allowing the rapacious flames to leap back toward the source of the spark or toward combustible fuel or water in the vicinity of the user.

  One precaution when using combustibles, advised by Aeneas the Tactician in 360 BC, was to hurl or otherwise emplace the unlit fuel first and then fire a blazing arrow or throw a burning pot to ignite it. That technique was used in AD 1190 by Arabs besieging the Crusader castle at Acre. The Muslims tossed pots of naphtha without fuses against the towers. When nothing happened, the Christians crowded onto the towers and mocked the besiegers. The Muslims held their fire and waited for the naphtha to soak in. Then they threw a lighted pot, and the whole edifice and all the Christians exploded in flames.

  With vaporous naphtha and other combustibles, the chances of accidental explosions were very high, as acknowledged in Byzantine warfare manuals. Preparations of volatile compounds were always done outdoors for fear of fire. Chinese texts warned that heating sulphur, arsenic, carbon, and saltpeter indoors had resulted in severe burns to the alchemists’ hands and faces, and even burned down the buildings where they were working. Naphtha bombs were especially difficult to aim and control, as the Umayyad Muslims learned during their siege of the holy city of Mecca in AD 683. As they catapulted naphtha projectiles into the city, they tried to avoid the Ka’aba, the sanctuary of the Black Stone worshipped by Muslims, but the covering was struck and caught fire. The intense heat split the sacred Black Stone into three pieces.

  And of course, wind could also betray wielders of liquid fire. In a famous military disaster on the Yangtze River in AD 975, the Chinese admiral Chu Ling-Pin watched in horror as the liquid fire his troops were propelling toward the enemy fleet of the Sung emperor was suddenly swept up by a strong contrary wind. The “smoke and flames were blown toward his own ships and men,” immolating more than 150,000 sailors and soldiers. “Overcome with grief,” the admiral “flung himself into the flames and died.”

  Petroleum bombs and naphtha flamethrowers posed hazards to the users because of the low viscosity and vaporous light fractions: the fuel tended to explode prematurely. The use of soaps and other agents to thicken and stabilize naphtha and/or gasoline in the 1940s is what led to the formulation of napalm, and allowed it to adhere to targets and burn at very high temperatures over a prolonged time. In antiquity, it was discovered that liquid naphtha could be somewhat stabilized with heavier oils, tar, or pitch, but those additives are themselves flammable. Handlers of such weapons always had to exercise great caution, even after the discovery of distillation techniques to remove the flammable vapors, a technique that led to the creation of the weapon known as Greek Fire.24

  According to evidence that survives in Islamic and Byzantine chronicles, the weapon known as Greek Fire was based on the development of effective distillation and siphon pump technologies which enabled a flammable mixture to be propelled under pressure from boats, thus introducing the deployment of “something new, dreadful, launchable, and flammable,” in the words of the historian Alfred Crosby.25

  Greek Fire’s origin is surrounded by fable. According to one legend, an angel whispered the formula to Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor in AD 300. But Greek Fire did not suddenly burst on the scene out of nowhere. Centuries of observations, discoveries, and experiments with combustible sulphur, quicklime, and naphtha—in formulas known by various names such as liquid fire, maltha, pyr automaton or automatic, artificial, or prepared fire, sea fire, wild fire, flying fire, oleum incendiarium, fierce fire oil, water-white naft abyad, and so on—ultimately led to the invention of the naval incendiary that was dubbed “Greek Fire” by the Crusaders in the 1200s. Naphtha had been a tool of siege-craft since Assyrian times and with Islamic mangonels and naffatun, naphtha weaponry reached its peak performance in land engagements. Further inventions in Syria and Constantinople (modern Istanbul) perfected naphtha armaments for battles at sea.

  What exactly was the “terrible agent of destruction” known as Greek Fire? The story of how the Byzantine and Islamic formulas, once heavily guarded state secrets, were lost, and the evolution of similar weapons in Indian and Chinese warfare, has been recounted in detail in modern military literature. Basically, Greek Fire was a weapon system for blasting ships in naval engagements: the weapon consisted of a refined chemical ammunition and an ingenious delivery system of cauldrons, siphons, tubes, and pumps.

  The main ingredient of the ammunition was naphtha, originally used as an incendiary poured over or hurled at besiegers in Mesopotamia, and later in firebombs catapulted by mangonels invented in Damascus and used by Muslims to bombard fortifications, as described earlier. The Byzantines had used small siphons and syringes to squirt petroleum incendiaries as early as AD 513, but the new technology of pumping pressurized, distilled naphtha through bronze tubes aimed at ships was achieved through brilliant chemical engineering by a “petroleum consultant” named Kallinikos. Fleeing the Muslim occupation of Syria, Kallinikos sought refuge in Constantinople in about AD 668 and taught the Byzantines about his invention. Greek Fire was first used to break the Muslim navy’s seven-year siege of Constantinople in AD 673 and it saved the city again from the Muslim fleet in AD 718.

  Kallinikos’s formula and delivery system are lost to modern science, and historians and chemists who try to reconstruct how the device worked disagree on the exact composition of the naphtha ammunition and the system design. Greek Fire burned in water and may have been ignited by water, and it adhered to victims. Besides distilled naphtha, the ingredients may have included thickeners such as resin or wax, quicklime, sulphur, turpentine, and saltpeter. The exact formula matters less than the amazing delivery system, which was capable of shooting liquid fire from swiveling nozzles mounted on small boats without the benefit of modern thermometers, safety valves, and pressure gauges.

  The only recourses available to crews facing Greek Fire—draping ships with masses of heavy, wet hides; only sailing in stormy weather; and attempting rapid, evasive maneuvers—were rarely successful and dangerous in themselves. “In short,” writes military historian Alex Roland, “there was no adequate countermeasure to Greek Fire.” From the seventh century on, the Byzantines and Arabs formulated variations on Greek Fire, which resembled napalm in the way “it clung to everything it touched, instantly igniting any organic material—ship’s hull, oars, sails, rigging, crew, and their clothing. Nothing was immune,” and even “jumping into the sea failed to quench the flames.” The weapon caused enemies to “shiver in terror” and capitulate in despair.

  Greek Fire was the ultimate weapon of its time. “Every man touched by it believed himself lost, every ship attacked with it was devoured by flames,” wrote a crusader in AD 1248. Partington, the historian of Greek Fire, compared the ancient reaction of horror to the modern dread of the atomic bomb. In 1139, the Second Lateran Council, following Western ideas of chivalry and honorable war, decreed that Greek Fire or similar burning weapons were “too murderous” to be used in Europe. The council’s decision was respected for centuries, but the issue may have been moot since the formula for Greek Fire seems to have been lost by the thirteenth century. The recipe was rekindled in a treatise published for Napoleon, with the chilling title “Weapons f
or the Burning of Armies.”26

  FIGURE 41. An artist’s conception of naval battle with Greek Fire.

  (Painting by Bob Lapsley/Aramco Services/PADIA)

  Centuries before the invention of Greek Fire, however, naphtha was already a weapon of devastating destructive power. The early precursors of Greek Fire, first described so graphically in the ancient Greek myth of Medea and Glauke, and then experienced in real battles during the Roman Empire, were the most dreaded, fearsome weapons of their day. There was no adequate countermeasure, no way to withstand such infernos. Neither extraordinary valor nor a suit of bronze armor could save a soldier enveloped by cascades of corrosive flames that melted both metal and flesh. The experiences of Lucullus and his Roman legions in the first century BC serve as a compelling case study of the effects of liquid fire.

  Veterans who served with Licinius Lucullus were among the first Romans to undergo naphtha attacks and they had nightmarish tales to tell of their campaigns in Asia. The story of Lucullus’s campaign is a fitting conclusion to this chapter on infernal fire weapons—and it also draws together a full range of the biochemical weapons described in the preceding chapters. Lucullus’s army faced a panoply of bio-terrors, from poisoned arrows, stinging bees, and savage bears to burning mud.