Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Ancient Infer Answers with me Murray.

Welcome to your weekly 10 minute fix of ancient history topics where I attempt to answer a question

from one of our viewers' patrons or just someone general randomly running into you and saying,

hey, what about this question?

So today's question is from someone named Nathan, and he says he's been watching for a couple of years,

one of his favorite channels, thank you, Nathan.

Is there an equivalent to the volley fire that the British

used to gain them an empire in ancient or pre-gunpowder war? Now, this is a bit of a rabbit

hole for me, so strap yourselves in. The basic question seems to be no, that in the ancient

world there isn't volley fire when we get mentions

of arches in the eliad and in later warfare we tend to get individual arrows doing a role

and individual sniping if you think of the arches in the in the iliad for instance they're

their single shot achievements.

You then move on into warfare such as the Persian Wars,

where the most famous comment about Persian Wars, of course,

is that the Persian arrows will blot out the sun,

which is Deionicis in book seven and Herodotus,

basically being told by the men of

Dracus that when the barbarians dischanged their arrows, they obscured the light of the sun by the

multitude of arrows, sorry, the multitude of arrows, so great was the number of their host.

Now that is not a volley, which is generally how it's seen. And when you look at

archery fire in ancient, or movies about ancient warfare, there's a, you know, a flight of arrows

...