IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023 - 19
Book Review
Classical Curiosities
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs:
Unconventional Warfare in the Ancient World-Adrienne Mayor
(Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton Univ. Press, 2022, 432 pp.)
Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths,
Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities-Adrienne Mayor
(Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton Univ. Press, 2022, 448 pp.)
Reviewed by Lewis M. Holmes
For engineers and scientists, the pleasure of
reading about ancient technology includes learning
how our ancestors accomplished challenging technical
tasks such as, for example, constructing massive
structures or communicating over long distances.
The latter subject has been explored wonderfully by
Gerard Holzmann and Björn Pehrson in their book
titled The Early History of Data Networks, which the
IEEE Computer Society published in 1995. Holzmann
and Pehrson trace the evolution of communication
technology from its simplest beginnings-think of
the lighting of a chain of fires to signal victory in
Homer's account of the Trojan War-through to a
form of telegraphy using optical semaphores that
became fully developed by around 1800. A great
deal of Holzmann and Pehrson's treatment focuses
on the design of codes to translate visual patterns
into useful information.
In the works under review here, Adrienne Mayor
demonstrates that writing about ancient technology
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3270485
Date of current version: 7 July 2023.
June 2023
can be made accessible and fascinating to engineers
and scientists, as well as to readers in other fields.
Mayor is an autodidactic classical historian and folklorist,
who has specialized in uncovering historical
truths in ancient myths and legends. This project
has proven rather productive: She has published
academic articles and books on topics as varied as
women warriors (Amazons), paleontology, the ruler
Mithridates of Pontus, robotics, weaponry, warfare,
and other aspects of life in antiquity. She is a visiting
scholar and affiliate in classics at Stanford University,
Stanford, CA, USA.
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs
is about ancient biochemical weapons and their
uses. This is a revised and updated version of a
text that the Mayor published under this same title
in 2003. It covers a broader geographical swath of
the world than the previous version and references
new information about chemical weapons, poisons,
heat rays, and ancient concepts of fairness
(and unfairness) in war.
Greek fire refers to a kind of incendiary weapon
or flamethrower that the Byzantines used in the
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19
http://orcid.org/0009-0004-2420-1859
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023
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