The Ancients - Origins of Biological & Chemical Warfare

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

The origins of biological and chemical warfare stretch far back; modern technology has not brought about these terrifying weapons. Throughout antiquity we have cases of societies using poisonous gases, incendiary materials and living organisms against their enemies. From snake and scorpion bombs to the use of ancient naphtha grenades. But how did the ancients view these infamous weapons? Did they try to refrain from using them? And if they did use them, why?I was thrilled to be joined by Adrienne Mayor to chat through this extraordinary topic. Adrienne is a folklorist and historian of ancient science at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous books including Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Welcome to The Ancients, a new podcast dedicated to all things, well, ancient. I'm Tristan Hughes, and in each episode I'll be chatting with a world's leading historian or archaeologist about our distant past. The art, the architecture, the battles,

the larger-than-life personalities, events that have helped shape the world we live in today. From Neolithic Britain to the fall of Rome, from the Assyrians to Alexander the Great. Boy, have I got a great topic for you today. I've got Adrienne Meyer on the podcast. She is a fantastic historian, and we are talking about biochemical warfare in the ancient world. Yes, that's right. We're talking scorpion bombs. We're talking snake bombs. We're talking ancient flamethrowers. We're talking ancient grenades. We're talking the use of plague to attack besieged cities and citadels. We're talking poison arrows. We're talking poison in general. It was insane. This was an amazing podcast to record. We had so much fun and I hope you have just as much fun listening to it. Enjoy.

Adrienne, it is fantastic to have you on the show. Thank you. Now, we're talking about one of the most insane topics I've ever heard of in ancient history, chemical warfare. When we think of chemical warfare, I know I do, you normally think of the 20th century, the horrific First World War battlefields or more modern times, but it has its roots much, much further back. That's right.

Very few people realize just how ancient biological and chemical warfare are. We tend to differentiate between biological and chemical warfare are. We tend to differentiate between biological and chemical warfare now, and we can talk about the definitions. Chemical warfare is the use of poisonous gases and incendiary materials, and biological weapons are usually based on living organisms like bacteria, viruses, parasites, spores, anything that will attack a person's biological vulnerabilities. So that would be plant toxins, venomous insects and animals, marine creatures, all sorts of biological weapons. It's just astounding how the ancients were able to weaponize whatever was around them in nature, whether it was minerals or organic things like animals and plants.

The roots go all the way back to ancient Greek mythology. So it has its roots not in actual history, as it were, but in mythical tales of the ancient Greek world. Well, the most ancient examples that we have come from mythology, but then that actually was followed by the physical documented use of biological and chemical weapons. So just ways of turning nature's armory to military use, they weren't just imagined in myth but then practiced much earlier and more extensively in the ancient world than most people have realized.

Just that idea of gaining sort of an unfair advantage using poisons, idea of gaining sort of an unfair advantage using poisons that first appears in Western literature in the myth of the great Greek hero Heracles or Hercules. He's the one who started it all. In his second labor, he set out to slay the Hydra, which was a monstrous poisonous serpent with many heads and the fangs all dripping deadly venom. And Heracles tried to use his brute strength and his ordinary weapons, tried to wrestle with the Hydra monster. That didn't work. He tried to use his sword to chop off the heads, but every time he chopped off a head, two more grew back. So he had to come up with something a little stronger. He decided to use a burning pine resin torch to cauterize each neck before the hydra could generate any more heads.

And that worked. So that's a kind of chemical weapon. But then it turned out that the hydra's central head was immortal. It couldn't be destroyed. So he hacked off that head and buried it deep in the ground. And he placed a huge stone over the spot. Now, Hercules is a trophy hunter. He's wearing the lion skin of his first labor, killing that great lion. Now he wants to take a trophy from the Hydra. And he dips all of his arrows in the venom of that Hydra monster. And therefore, he's come up with the first biological weapon in mythology.

And what's really interesting is that that whole story just goes on to predict all of the practical and ethical dilemmas that surround the use of biological weapons since that myth. The Hydra, with its multiplying heads, it's a really fitting symbol of the proliferating problems that come from using biological and chemical weapons. And you mentioned poison arrows right there. Did the ancient Greeks themselves use poison arrows? Or were there particularly cultures which we know use them more than others?

The Greeks like to say that only barbarians used poison arrows. But once again, if we go back to myth, go back to the Odyssey by Homer. Odysseus, he's a warrior, but he's also a trickster and he is an archer. So he depends on arrows. And Homer actually tells us that Odysseus travels to a special place in order to find a toxic plant, probably hellebore, to treat his arrows. So we know that Odysseus, one of the heroes of the Trojan War in Homer's epics, used poison weapons. Now that's in mythology. The Greeks themselves were not, all of them were archers, but they do have that model of Odysseus using poison arrows. And we know that Achilles in the Iliad died of a poisoned arrow that was shot into his heel while he had his back turned by Paris. Homer doesn't really say that

it's a poison arrow, but a wound in your heel would be superficial unless it carried poison into your bloodstream. So even there, the hint is that poison arrows were used by the greatest heroes of Greek mythology. The same poison that Odysseus used for his arrows, the Greeks literally used during the Sacred War in about 590 BC. The Athenians and their allies decided to poison the water supply of the town of Cyra they were fighting against with their allies in the Sacred War near Delphi, and they poisoned the water supply of the city that they were besieging. And what's interesting about that is that they used hellebore, the toxic plant that Odysseus used

on his arrows. But also what's interesting, and this applies to a lot of biological and chemical weapons, they affect the non-combatants, the civilians, as well as the soldiers. So everyone in the town of Kira was affected by the poison, and there was an utter massacre of the entire town. So there's no way to have poison weapons discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. That's horrific. So it sounds really like the ultimate morale-destroying weapon. Absolutely. The psychological advantage of using a secret weapon like poisoned arrows or poisoning water supply, but also if you advertise that you're using poison weapons with those people. So it was actually a very powerful way to deter certain leaders from actually invading territory if there was the fear of their enemy using this deadly weapon against them.

Absolutely. I think the psychological advantages of using poison weapons like that must have given people quite an advantage. What's interesting to me is that I recently found out since the publication of my book, David Jones has collected all the evidence for Native American and other peoples around the world use of poison arrows and poison projectiles. And what's interesting is that a great many of them also used viper venom, snake venom, in various ways to poison their arrows. And it sounds improbable, right? It sounds like how would that really work? But it turns out that snake venom crystallizes and it can last for a very long time, especially on wooden or metal arrowheads. I read that in the Victoria and Albert Museum, there are some examples of poison arrows from at least 900 to 1,000 years ago, and the venom that was crystallized on the tips was still

viable. So that's how long it can last. But of course, it brings up yet another problem, the blowback and friendly fire problems. The risk of self-injury is quite dangerous for anyone who uses weapons like this. If you go back to the myth of Heracles, Hercules, how did he die? He was a victim of second-hand arrow poison. His own hydra-poisoned arrows were the cause of his death in the end. Yes. Alexander the Great faced enemies with poison arrows in the Far East as well, didn't he? That's right. So it was during his campaigns in India, they were facing the city of Hermetalia, Alexander and his Macedonians. And they could not figure out why the city seemed to have this incredible confidence that they were going to win. And they soon found

out why anyone in the Macedonian army who was even slightly wounded or scratched by one of the arrows coming from the Hermitilians or one of the spears fell into hideous suffering and died. We have all the details of what they suffered, so the symptoms of these arrow wounds. And it turns out that the Hermitilians were poisoning their arrows with viper venom. Well, most scholars had thought that it must have been cobra venom, but I talked with a herpetologist who helped me figure out from the symptoms of the death of Alexander's soldiers that it would not have been cobra venom, but probably from a viper called the Russell's viper, which causes a huge number of deaths in India and Pakistan even today. So that

was Alexander the Great's experience with poison arrows. He also encountered some fireballs that were filled with a kind of mineral incendiary, perhaps from petroleum. That was also described by the ancient historians who recorded Alexander's campaigns. And recently, some archaeologists found some evidence at the city that that happened. They found some physical evidence of those fireballs that had been hurled at Alexander the Great's army. So there we have a very rare example of archaeological evidence of a chemical weapon. Regarding those kind of contraptions in the ancient world, are we talking about flamethrowers or flame-bearing catapults?

Well, first of all, there were fire arrows, which are fairly simple to make. The Persians used those when they attacked Greece and Athens. They used fire arrows when they were burning down the Acropolis during the Persian War. Fire arrows, as you can imagine, would be quite easy to make. You just wrap the end of the arrow in some sort of flammable material and set it on fire. But there are other chemical incendiaries that were used during the Peloponnesian War that are a little more sophisticated. At Plataea, the Spartans actually were besieging the city, and they decided to make a huge bonfire outside the city walls. And to enhance that fire, they turned to chemicals. They threw lumps of raw sulfur

and pitch into the fire, and that created a poison gas. That's the first documented incident we have of a poison gas being used in warfare, and in fact, it was successful. There were other uses of incendiaries in the Middle East, especially because, as you know, lots of petroleum was accessible to people, and the volatile light fraction of petroleum, naphtha, was known as liquid fire. Well, the Greeks and Romans had not encountered that, but it was quite familiar to people in Mesopotamia in the Middle East, and there are some ancient reliefs in Mesopotamia. You can see people defending the walls by throwing down little grenades that have flames coming from them, probably naphtha grenades. And there too, I believe a few examples of clay naphtha grenades have been found at some battle sites in Mesopotamia. So once again, we have some archaeological evidence of chemical warfare.

Wow. There was a recent very popular TV series on, I think it was called Game of Thrones. And of course, one of the most famous weapons that we see on that is the wildfire. Do you think the historical accuracy behind that would have been the Greek fire and the naphtha of antiquity and through history. Absolutely. I think they were spinning off of the early uses of naphtha. The Romans called it maltha. They thought that it was a kind of burning mud. That's a really good description by Pliny, I believe. He called it either liquid fire or burning mud. That was used in Mesopotamia. And the fact that it can cling so tenaciously and then flow like water, and it's unquenchable. I think in Game of Thrones, they certainly were thinking of the early uses of Maltha or Naptha, and then Greek fire, of course, which was feared all through the

late antiquity, a late Roman Empire, all the way up to the Middle Ages. And then the recipe and the method was lost. That's when we lost the details of how to make Greek fire and how to deliver Greek fire. There was someone who tried to sell the recipe to Napoleon, but I believe that the deal fell through. Thank goodness for that. In that regard, obviously, there was no Geneva Convention equivalent in the ancient world but how did they view using these weapons? Historians have sort of assumed that there were ancient rules of war that would mean that bio-war chemical warfare was rarely waged in antiquity because there would be strong social taboos against using poison and secret weapons. They just assumed that biological tactics were sort of specifically forbidden

in ancient codes of war, and that people generally followed those rules. But that's a kind of nostalgic view. There was a lot of deep-seated aversion to using unfair or cruel weapons and tactics in many ancient cultures. In fact, in all of the ancient cultures that I studied that had anything written down about using this kind of weaponry, they expressed qualms about them. But the evidence shows that such weapons were used and that there were very ambivalent attitudes toward them,

and in fact, there were no real written rules of war against using these weapons. There was disapproval of weapons that used underhanded tactics like that, but there weren't really any rules against them. Cicero had some rules of war that he wrote down, but those only covered legitimate grounds for initiating a military campaign or a war, not that actual conduct or what weapons would be approved. One which really struck out to me with the current climate, with COVID-19, was something about the ancient Hittites and a pathogen plague. Yes, ancient Sumerian and Hittite cuneiform tablets,

they demonstrate a practical understanding of contagion. And now we're going back to about 1700 BC. There are some cuneiform tablets talk about sending victims of plague into enemy lands. And then other cuneiform tablets have royal decrees forbidding people to touch the belongings, cups and clothing of plague victims. So people did understand contagion, and it occurred to people to use that as a weapon. So one of the tablets apparently was attached to livestock that was sent into enemy

lands, and it prays to a goddess to afflict the enemy livestock with the same disease that is afflicting these animals. So they were using plague victims to attack their enemies? Yes. And you know, you don't have to completely understand toxicology, biology, epidemiology, pathology, or chemistry to weaponize things like that. You don't really need modern understandings. All you need is observation over a period of time, some experimentation, maybe like Mithridates, and then a willingness to resort to those kind of weapons. So that's all you need to be able to use biological and chemical weapons. Go on then. You mentioned him just then. Why is Mithridates so significant in biological

warfare of antiquity? Well, he's interesting to me because he's credited with being the world's first experimental toxicologist. He was very paranoid about being assassinated by poison, with good reason. Not only did people use a lot of poisons in his culture and time, but he himself poisoned almost every single member of his family and many so-called friends and enemies. So he was obsessed with finding a universal antidote for himself to protect himself against all manner of poisons. And he did experiments. I mean, besides carrying out 40 years of war with the Romans, he found time to experiment with all manner of poisons and toxins and venoms and plant poisons and their antidotes. And he came up with a concoction or a recipe that apparently contained about more than 50 ingredients, ingredients, minute amounts of poisons with minute amounts of their antidotes. And Pliny actually saw his handwritten notes after the end of the Mithridatic Wars. So we know that these experiments

really did take place and that he really did come up with some sort of universal antidote that he took every day to protect himself. And he lived to the ripe old age of about 73 when everyone else around him has a life expectancy of about 40-something. So he was robust at about 73 years old. Maybe there was something to it. And in fact, modern vaccines are based on taking into your body small amounts of pathogen or a toxin,

and then in that manner you become immune. So he fascinates me for that reason. But he also used a lot of poisons, and his allies used an interesting variety of toxic and biological and chemical weapons against the Romans. One of them was poisoned honey, which I think was used against Xenophon back in the 5th century BC, and also by Russians who lived in the same region where Mithridates had once had his kingdom. So toxic honey can be used as a weapon, as I say, you can weaponize almost anything. And he develops his reputation and they call him the Poison King. Yes, I sort of dubbed him the Poison King.

And now people assume that he was called that in antiquity, but I don't think he was. He was dreaded for his use of poison and also admired for his universal antidote. So that was the title of my book in 2010. It's sort of become his nickname now. And he has quite an interesting end then, doesn't he, with the poison experimenting and actually his own demise? That's right. You know, he was a master of poisons and antidotes. And he actually gave his friends and his chief officers in the military poison pills to keep in the handle of their daggers or swords to have with them at all times. Hannibal did this too. Hannibal

killed himself when he was imprisoned by the Romans with poison that he kept in the handle of his sword. Mithridates did too. And you can be pretty sure that since he was a master of poisons, he kept a poison in his dagger that he was not immune to. He would have chosen one that he knew he could commit suicide with, right? So when the end came, he was trapped in a tower of one of his castles in the Crimea, and the Romans were surrounding him. And he's trapped in this tower with his two young daughters. Now he wants to commit suicide, but he also doesn't want to leave his two young daughters to be captured by the Romans. So he shares the poison that's in his dagger with the two young girls. And there's not quite enough to

kill Mithridates. So he has to ask his bodyguard to run him through with a sword. Now, the Romans made a great deal of this story. They thought it was a wonderful, ironic end to Mithridates, the master of poisons. Tried to make himself immune to poisons and succeeded so well that he was unable to commit suicide with poison. And that is the story that has stuck to him to this day. People have little memes about haha, he made himself immune to poisons. And then when he really needed to kill himself with poison, was unable to. But I think I figured out why the poison didn't work. He shared it with his daughters. And of course, logically, he would not have made himself immune to his suicide poison.

not have made himself immune to his suicide poison. So I think once again, this wily commander and king, Mithridates, was able to escape the Romans even in the end. That's fantastic. Sorting the fact from the fiction. Extraordinary. You mentioned Hannibal just there as well, Mithridates, and I think Demosthenes did it too. The amount of prominent figures in antiquity who did end their lives with the ancient equivalent of a cyanide capsule, that is extraordinary. You can see during warfare, if you're fighting the Romans during the Mithridatic Wars, very bad things happen to captives. So you want to deny the enemy access to your live body when you lose. And so you supply yourself and your friends and officers with the equivalent of cyanide pills. We mentioned just then Hannibal. Now, he's also famous for employing a different, more scary type

of biological warfare, didn't he? Well, he had quite a few ruses that he used against the Romans. He would use animals, tying burning brush to the antlers of cows in order to frighten the Romans. He would use animals tying burning brush to the antlers of cows in order to frighten the Romans. He also, during a battle with the Greek king Eumenes in the Aegean, used catapults to catapult baskets full of live vipers onto the ships of his enemy. And as you've pointed out, the psychological advantage would be quite strong to have slithering live vipers landing on the decks of a ship. It's not good for morale or discipline. There's not many places you can go to escape of many vipers on the ship, isn't there? Absolutely. It's as effective as Greek fire in the end, because you soldiers are completely distracted and terrified. He wasn't the only one to catapult or

hurl living toxic animals. I think one of my favorite stories is the story of the scorpion grenades or bombs at the fortress of Hatra that was used against the Romans in this case. fortress of Hatra that was used against the Romans in this case. Hatra was a fortress that's near Mosul in Iraq, became famous during the Iraq War. Hatra was sort of the guardian of the crossroads of the spice and trade routes. So it was a very rich city and the Romans were besieging it. And the people of Hatra first used Naphtha against the Roman emperor. It was Septimius Severus who was leading the siege, second century. The Romans usually continue their sieges, but the Naphtha poured down the walls by Hatra

against the Romans, burned their siege engines, and Septimius Severus retreated from the siege. But then he came back, and this time the Hatra citizens were ready for them again. They went out into the desert before the Romans arrived and gathered up live scorpions. Now, the scorpions of Iraq are known as death stalker scorpions. They're very large, very deadly, and very plentiful in the desert. There are reports that the Persian king used to have a bounty on people killing scorpions, baskets and baskets full of scorpions, just to make the

roads of his kingdom passable. So the people of Hattur went out and gathered these death stalker scorpions, put them into clay pots, and then sealed them up and waited there with their ammunition at the top of their walls for the Romans. And when the Romans arrived, they began throwing these clay pots down onto the Romans, who are, of course, in armor. The clay pots fragment on the armor, and then the scorpions crawl out. And as you can imagine, the terror of the Romans was quite extreme. It doesn't even matter if anyone got stung, right? Just the idea of these death stalker scorpions crawling all over your body. This is one of the first times that the Romans actually withdrew from a siege and never came back. So the people of Hatra leave a very big

impression on the Romans. Yes, that's right. You know, National Geographic, for one of their stories, they decided to recreate a scorpion bomb from Hatra. And they got an archaeologist to make a replica pot that would be, you know, historically accurate for that time and place. And then they found, believe it or not, a pet store in Rhode Island that sold Deathstalker scorpions. So they got six or seven of those Deathstalker scorpions and brought them to the National Geographic offices. And now the photographer

wants to put them into a pot and take an x-ray of the pot. That is his plan. But how do you stuff live scorpions into a pot without blowback or self-injury, friendly fire? The ancient people who gathered scorpions for these purposes, they said that if you could spit very carefully onto the end of the scorpion's tail, then that would plug the stinger. But that's very difficult to do, I think. I can't imagine being able to do that. So the photographers at National Geographic came up with another plan, and it's one that was not available to the people of Hatra. They put the scorpions in the refrigerator where they had their lunches to slow them down, and then they could take them out. The cold scorpions were not

very active. And they could get them into the pots and seal it up and take a photograph and an x-ray of the pot. If that was nowadays, but you think of, I don't know, those poor sailors of Hannibal or those citizens of Hattra who were stuffing these poison vipers or scorpions into these jars, there must have been a degree of fear among them, the possibility of friendly fire. Yes, that's right. And one of the main blowback problems just in general of using biological and chemical weapons is the idea that if you use them, then your enemy is going to be justified in using them as well. And that's usually the reason given against using these weapons in modern times by military thinkers and our own generals and commanders don't want to use these weapons because it will justify the use of such weapons against

our own soldiers. So we can learn a lot from ancient history about the psychological impact of chemical and biological warfare and the repercussions today. Yes. I think it's important to know that it's not just modern technology that brings us these kinds of weapons. There's probably no time in history when such unfair biological and chemical weapons were unthinkable. They were always contemplated. People had the intention and the desire to use them, and then they really did use them. So we can't imagine a time that was innocent of such tactics. And it's interesting that the justifications are pretty similar too. People use them when they're outnumbered or they feel hopeless, or if they don't consider their enemies to be human beings,

then it's easier to justify using weapons like this. So we just have to depend on the sort of cultural social aversion to using unnecessarily cruel and sneaky sort of secret weapons. It really sort of erases the ideas of courage and bravery in warfare too. I also think it's hopeful that every culture I studied, as I mentioned, they expressed at least ambivalence and some qualms against using such underhanded and unfair weapons. Fantastic. Adrienne, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the interview. If you'd like to learn more about biochemical warfare in the ancient world,

I'd recommend Adrienne's newly republished book. It's called Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs, Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World. Do check it out.