Terror, and the Screaming Bullets of the Ancients

Burnswark Hill in Scotland dominates the local landscape. A prominent mound in the south of the country, atop its commanding slopes sits an iron age hill fort and a surrounding community, spread across some seven hectares.

Such arrangements are not uncommon across the British Isles and indeed continental Europe. These hill forts can tell us much about the people who built them, their priorities and their fears.

We can see from the large earthworks and wood palisades guarding narrow entranceways that these people feared an all-out attack at close quarters. We can see from the size of the area protected by the fort that they sought to defend their entire community from such raiders.

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We can see from where they were built that high ground was by far the preference for such forts. They were more easily defended from an attacker travelling uphill, but there is something more to this feature, and the answer can be found in Burnswark and in hundreds of other sites: the defenses were not just against swords and arrows, but something potentially even more dangerous.

These sites are generally covered with small, almond shaped stones. These offer a clue to a key weapon in the iron age arsenal, one which is often overlooked but one which appears to be amongst the most versatile weapons in history. 

These weapons could kill through armor, or turn your fort into a blazing inferno. They could sow terror and chaos amidst defenders, shrieking through the air like a ghost. They could be easily and cheaply manufactured, and could kill from half a kilometer away.

These stones came from slings. And the ones at Burnswark are especially unusual.

Iron Age Terror Tactics

Surprisingly slings are, to an extent, a lost technology. This may seem surprising given the simplicity of design, with the sling itself being little more than a twisted rope or length of leather designed to fling stones, but apparently the ancients were much better at making them than we are.

There is much we do not know, even as to the basics of the design. Perhaps most prominently is the shape of the stone: most are shaped like an almond, but the reason for this has been lost, with only theories as to aerodynamic efficiency, ease of manufacture or secure storage remaining.

Slings were also a weapon easily taught to raw recruits. Although there were certainly expert slingers in the Iron Age, generally said to come from the Iberian peninsula and known for their deadly accuracy over great range, these weapons could be fielded en-masse with very little time needed to prepare them.

This only becomes more confusing when contemporary accounts are factored in. The most effective sling ammunition was made from lead, but there are stories of leaden bullets being propelled with such speed and ferocity that they melted in flight.

Such bullets were said to be able to penetrate any arm or of the day with deadly force, something modern experiments have been unable to reproduce. It seems in fact that lead ammunition may have been, to an extent, experimental: such metal bullets varied wildly in design and size.

Clay bullets were much easier to construct and some effort seems to have been made to mass produce these to a common approved design. Julius Caesar noted the effectiveness of such ammunition, along with another unexpected benefit: clay bullets could be used to set fires.

Caesar talks of the clay shot being heated before launch. Such ammunition was then fired in enormous volleys at the wooden and thatch structures of enemy defenses, causing widespread fire throughout the encampment. 

But it is the bullets at Burnswark which are, perhaps, the most interesting at all. Bullets have been found here in large numbers amongst the detritus of a Roman attack on the native fort, but these are not like typical sling bullets.

For a start they are smaller than typical sling stones. Their reduced size means they could not travel as far, nor do as much damage as normal ammunition. Something else is going on here.

Furthermore, the ammunition is compromised aerodynamically. Small holes appear to have been drilled into the bullets, generally one to each bullet, which has the effect of rendering the stone less accurate in flight, and with an even lower range.

What then is going on here. Once again it seems our ancestors know something about sling warfare that we don’t, but modern experiments may provide the answer.

When flung, these small and asymmetrical stones are certainly far worse than standard stones at causing damage. But in flight they appear to do something the other ammunition doesn’t. They scream.

The Romans were not trying to destroy their enemy with these stones. They were sending volley after volley or whistling stones through the air, an attempt to break the natives through psychological warfare

The Nazis, with their famous dive bombing Stuka, did something similar. When in a steep dive to attack a target these planes would howl, a noise which has become so familiar that many assume this is simply the noise planes make while steeply descending.

This did not come from any aerodynamic aspect of the plane, nor was it connected to the bombs. A pair of “Jericho horns” mounted on the plane would create the sound, to scare potential targets. And so it was with the Romans and their sling stones.

This idea of whistling stones remains a theory, of course. It does however fit all the available facts. These smaller stones, launched several at a time, could have scared the defenders behind the walls of their hill fort which had resisted any normal attack.

Some lead stones contained imprints or phrases which hint at how these weapons were perceived in antiquity. Many feature lightning bolts or other designs which suggest these bullets were feared for arriving without warning, scorpions or snakes being also common.

So these were weapons to be feared by those who knew them, deadly attacks out of nowhere and without warning. But it seems that the Romans attacking the hill fort at Burnswark may have thought up something new. These stones you could hear, and the knowledge they were coming may have been as terrifying as the silence of the stones which came before.

Top Image: Neolithic bullets and sling from Anatolia, thought to date back to 9,000 BC. Source: Harald the Bard / CC BY-SA 4.0.