Infected and putrefying corpses, whether animal or human, were readymade bioweapons when dumped into an enemy’s water supply or launched over a city wall, bringing dismay as well as disease.
Biological weapons may seem like relatively modern entrants into the bloody history of human conflict, and why not? The
itself wasn’t coined until the 20th century, entering the lexicon during the horrors of World War I. Its shorter synonym,describes biological weapons as devices or methods that “disseminate disease-causing organisms or toxins to harm or kill humans, animals or plants,” as chillingly succinct a definition as anyone would care to have.
But the concept of biological warfare is indisputably ancient — and as weapons of mass destruction, bioweapons of centuries past were just as terrifying to soldiers and civilians then as their modern equivalents are to us today.and spears technically became bioweapons the moment their tips were dipped into poison, excrement or even simple, microbe-rich dirt. Some military leaders of the past were more diabolically creative than others in their waging of biological warfare.
But because history’s biological warmongers didn’t fully comprehend the forces they wielded, their ancient bioweapons often had unintended consequences, doing their own people harm, and sometimes causing catastrophic collateral damage that stretched around the globe and across the centuries.The Hittite empire originated around 1600 B.C. in what is now Turkey. Their domain was sizable, with the empire becoming a significant power in the Middle East.
. But the Hittites may also have the dubious honor of engaging in one of the earliest examples of biological warfare.
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