Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Ancient Warfare Answers with me, Murray, your weekly

dose of ancient warfareness. Hopefully you are having a good week. And I'm about to answer a question

from an email from David Pollack from New York.

So I'll get to that in a minute.

First, however, of course, you can ask us a question.

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So the question that we've got, of course, this time round from David is I am researching

siege warfare and late antiquity for a historical novel.

And he's come across a book by Michael Bonner, which has a line, which has perplexed, David.

And essentially, it says, minds shattered a part of the walls of Jerusalem.

David asks, is that right?

I thought gunpowder wasn't invented until hundreds of years later.

So the first thing is this seems to be a use of the word mine that doesn't really give us the proper sense of what an ancient mine in siege warfare was.

Use of the word shattered the walls. Again, misleads us because it should say collapsed

...