48 R. Maclagan — On Early Asiatic Fire Weapons. [No. 1 



Mr. Fergusson has observed, with reference to siege scenes represented 

 in the sculptures of one of the Sanchi gateways (supposed to have been 

 erected about the beginning of the Christian era) , that no engines of war 

 are shown, or indications of any attempt to set fire to the place. " I n 

 these respects", he says, " the Hindus seem to have been very much behind 

 the stage we know from the Nineveh sculptures that the Assyrians reached 

 at a much earlier age." # And Babu Eajendralala Mitra, who makes re- 

 ference, in the work before quoted, to the siege scenes in the Sanchi bas- 

 reliefs, and to the absence of any indication of engines for casting fire to a 

 distance, or for battering, adds that the martial processions and battle 

 scenes at Bhuvaneswara are also devoid of such representations. f These, 

 however, are only pieces of negative evidence, and do not, by themselves, 

 go far. There are European mediaeval pictures of siege operations in which 

 no engines of war are represented, or indications of the use of fire, but only 

 such means of attack and defence as are shown in these Indian sculptures, t 

 It may be, and it seems probable, that the Hindus were behind Western 

 nations in the knowledge of the mechanical appliances for such purposes, 

 (as the Chinese were, so late as the thirteenth century of our era§) but 

 they did use fire, and the accounts in books give us what the sculptures omit. 

 Yet we may conclude that nothing more advanced in the way of fire 

 weapons was known in India in ancient times, than was in use in other 

 countries; || and that the application to these old Indian weapons, of terms 

 belonging to weapons of our own time, is an illustration of the inadvertent 

 (or at least in some way erroneous) transference of familiar ideas to times 

 and places to which they do not belong. Shakspeare brings in cannon in 

 the time of King John. 



The prohibition in Manu is probably the earliest notice on record of 

 fire arrows, unless, as has been supposed, they are referred to in Psalm 



* Tree and Serpent Worship, p. 141. 



f Antiquities of Orissa, I. 121. 



% Wilkinson says, " We may suppose" that the Ancient Egyptians used fire missiles 

 in sieges (I, 363), but there is nothing in the pictures or sculptures to countenance this 

 supposition, and he mentions nothing in support of it. 



§ See Yule's Marco Polo, 2nd Ed., II, 152. The accounts of the employment of the 

 Polos in the construction of the engines to aid Kublai in the siege of Siangyang are 

 confused ; hut it appears at all events that Western engineers were employed, and from 

 some accounts, that they were specially sent for. Not that the Chinese and their enemies 

 were altogether unacquainted with war machines, hut the people of the West were ahead 

 of them. 



|| Nothing of much value is obtained from the statement in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus 

 that the followers of Bacchus, in his invasion of India and battle with Deriades, fought 

 with brands and bolts of fire. (As. Res., XVII, 617.) The question whether the 

 materials for the Indian part of the poem were derived from an Indian source is dis- 

 cussed in the paper here referred to, by Prof. H. H. Wilson. 



