Book: Siege Weapons of the Middle Ages: India, Byzantiu

In the medieval Middle East, it was believed that the creator of the first catapult for throwing stones was "Nimrod, the king of Babylon", and that he allegedly learned these secrets from the Devil himself. Army of the Romans, Greeks, ancient Persians. In the early Vitzantine Constantinople there was a so-called. "Maggan" - a library of handwritten books on military affairs and technical drawings. Similar sources of knowledge were among the early Persians, as well as the kings of India. A number of these ancient texts exist to this day, especially the books used in Byzantium, as well as fragments of the Persian military manuals, which were subsequently set forth in medieval Arabic manuscripts. But about the Indian technical sources, history unfortunately did not leave anything.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to consider the siege machines used in the Middle East only a continuation of their ancient counterparts. In fact, both medieval Byzantium and the Islamic world experienced a real boom in the development of military engineering. The countries of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Iran and even some parts of India adopted China´s military technology, which at that time turned out to be much more modern and advanced than the combat engineering thought of the Greco-Roman world ...