In the ruins of Xanadu, the summer capital of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (r. A.D. 1260–1294), Chinese archaeologists unearthed one of the world’s earliest surviving guns. Measuring just 14 inches long, the bronze hand cannon was stamped with a serial number and a date corresponding to A.D. 1298. The small cannon was fashioned by Chinese artisans who benefited from working in a tradition of gunpowder weaponry that was already at least 400 years old. Some time just before the rise of China’s Song Dynasty (A.D. 960–1279), alchemists in search of new medicines found that, by combining nitrates such as saltpeter with sulfur and charcoal, they could create a chemical explosive. The Chinese word for gunpowder means “fire medicine,” but Song Dynasty officials were soon using the compound to construct simple explosives such as fire arrows and, in time, bombs. “People often think Europeans were the first to understand the military implications of gunpowder,” says Emory University historian Tonio Andrade. “But the Chinese understood gunpowder’s potential very early on.” By A.D. 1150, Song soldiers were using bamboo and wood proto-guns known as fire lances that were essentially flamethrowers.

Historians have long regarded the Song Dynasty as militarily weak because the nomadic Liao, Jin, and Western Xia Dynasties encroached on its territory before it finally fell to the Mongols in A.D. 1279. Andrade points out that, in this turbulent period, these confrontations likely spurred rapid innovations in gunpowder warfare, leading to the creation of weapons that might be recognized today as guns. “What a gun looked like then is blurry by our standards,” he says. “Even the Xanadu gun may have been more like a fire lance than what we think of as a gun.”

Two early metal cannons that seem to have functioned as guns have been unearthed in China’s northwestern Gansu Province, the domain of the Western Xia (A.D. 1038–1227). They bear no inscriptions, but based on the area where they were excavated, they may date to the early thirteenth century A.D. One cannon was even discovered with an iron ball and a measure of gunpowder still in its barrel. By A.D. 1227, the Mongols overwhelmed the Western Xia and went on to embrace gunpowder warfare. Guns spread throughout Asia in the wake of the Mongol conquests, reaching Europe by A.D. 1326. That year, the first known European illustration of a cannon appeared in a Latin treatise on the proper behavior of kings.

Some time around 89 B.C.—the exact year is debated—Roman forces led by the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla laid siege to the city of Pompeii, likely in response to its residents’ agitation for full Roman citizenship. The walls on the city’s north side, where fortifications were particularly weak, still bear the impact marks of projectiles fired by the attacking Romans. In a number of areas inside the city walls, archaeologists have found catapult balls, small lead slingshot bullets, and machine-launched arrows known as scorpio bolts, all fired during the siege. “I don’t think anyone at the time was under any illusions that sustained bombardment would actually bring down the walls,” says archaeologist Ivo Van der Graaff of the University of New Hampshire. “It looks like one of the Romans’ tactics was to just fire munitions into the city to cause damage and, perhaps, lower morale.”

By the Middle Ages, engineers had perfected projectile-launching machines that could wreak havoc on even the most robust fortifications. During recent excavations at Hay Castle in southeast Wales, archaeologists unearthed a thirteenth-century stone ball catapulted from a siege machine called a trebuchet. The 63-pound stone is roughly the same size and weight as catapult balls excavated at other Welsh castles. “Only multiple impacts in the same place would demolish a wall,” says archaeologist Chris Caple of Durham University. “Trebuchet balls were deliberately created to be the same weight and size so they would all land in the same spot when fired.” Although researchers haven’t yet found other archaeological evidence of a siege at Hay Castle, documents record multiple fires and attacks during the thirteenth century, including one in July 1265, when the nobleman Simon de Montfort, King Henry III’s leading opponent, took the castle with the aid of allied Welsh princes.

The use of a blunt object to strike an opponent may be the simplest—and the oldest—method of armed combat. Two artifacts separated by an ocean and more than five millennia, however, illustrate that items appearing to have this particular function may actually have been designed and used for multiple purposes. The first, a club known as the Thames Beater, was discovered in the mud on the banks of England’s Thames River and dates to around 3500 B.C. The beater was likely a utilitarian object employed in a variety of daily activities, as well as for self-protection. “Single-function weapons of violence are largely absent in the Neolithic period in Western Europe,” says archaeologist Linda Fibiger of the University of Edinburgh. “We tend to think of them as weapon-tools that probably had multiple functions, which could include use as a weapon.”

The second artifact, an ornately carved war club, was originally recovered in the 1970s from the wreck of the Spanish ship San Pedro, which sank off the coast of Bermuda in 1596. It may have been used in combat only sparingly, if at all. This type of club, which rarely survives, was wielded by Carib-speaking people from the region surrounding the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela and on the Caribbean islands to the north. Some examples were collected as curios by early colonial explorers. “These clubs were formidable weapons made of heavy, durable wood, though their considerable length would have made them somewhat unwieldy, unless you were a certain distance from your opponent,” says archaeologist Joanna Ostapkowicz of the University of Oxford. “I would think this style of weapon became more linked with status—the longer and more impressive your club, the higher your standing in the community.”