Brandy from Brandy’s Bustlings wanted me to write about the
history of the word “yellow” as an insult, but I couldn’t find anything on that
just by typing “why is the word yellow used as an insult” into Google, and it’s
been a long day and I’m tired, so maybe I’ll just bounce that back to her. I usually
like to have more than one fact in my Fun Friday Facts, anyway.
Instead, I’m going with another topic inspired by a comment
I received last week. Facebook friend and fellow blogger Darla Dollman pointed out that, in
1346, the Mongolian army employed biological warfare when they used
plague cadavers to contaminate the enemy’s water supply during the siege of
Caffa. I also recall seeing something on The History Channel recently
about people in Biblical times filling up clay pots with live bees and lobbing
them at people during battle. They didn’t explain exactly how the ancient
people got the bees into the pots and kept them there long enough to seal the
things up, so I’m skeptical.
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| I mean, bee wrangling normally requires special suits and everything. |
Perhaps the earliest recorded use of biological warfare
dates back to the 14th century BC, when armies fighting in Anatolia deliberately
brought tularemia to the enemy’s doorstep, but also probably brought it
home with them when the battle was over. The epidemic had already touched much
of the Mediterranean world, from Cyprus to Iraq and from Palestine to Syria,
excepting Egypt, which quarantined itself.
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| Smart thinking, Egypt. |
Poison was a popular
agent of biological warfare in the ancient world. In 590 BC, Athenian and
Amphictyonic League soldiers fighting the First Sacred War against the city of
Kirrha used hellebore to poison the enemy’s water supply. In the 5th
century BC, Scythian warriors used
a putrefied mixture of blood, dung and snake’s venom to poison their
arrowheads. Alexander the Great’s army fell victim to biological warfare in
India, when the enemy used the venom of Russell’s viper to poison their
arrowheads.
In 184 BC, Hannibal of Carthage, of Alps-crossing fame,
fought King Eumenes of Pergamon by having clay pots filled with venomous snakes
chucked at his battleships. Again, no word on how they got the snakes into the
pots. In 198 AD, the city of Hatra, in present-day Iraq, fought off the Roman
army by pitching clay pots filled with scorpions at them.
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| "Fuck this noise, let's go back to Rome." |
Throughout the Middle Ages, the tossing of dead bodies, both
human and animal, plague-ridden and non, into besieged communities was
considered an effective form of biological warfare. It was believed that the
very reek of decomposing corpses was enough to kill those within the besieged city's walls. The strategy was employed during the siege of Thun-l’Évêque, in 1340,
when besiegers flung dead animals into the city. It was used again in 1422 in
Bohemia, when besiegers of the Karlstein Castle catapulted dead bodies over the
castle walls. For good measure, they also tossed 2,000 carriage loads of dung.
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| It's raining shit! Image credit: Dorai Raj L. |
