Discovery Channel - Superweapons of the Ancient World (2004) Part The Ram

Long before the atomic age, military masters engineered terrifying machines of war that were heralded as the technological wonders of the day. How would these “weapons of mass destruction” of millennia past measure up today? Superweapons of the Ancient World, a three-part documentary puts the theory to the test, as teams of experts are challenged to re-create some of the ancient world's most fearsome weapons and test them in action. With only seven days to do the job and using only materials sourced on location in the ancient kingdom of Morocco, engineers, timber framers and blacksmiths set out to create three of the deadliest weapons in antiquity the claw, the ram and city destroyer. The function of the weapons must be as authentic as possible, but the team is permitted to use modern tools and techniques where necessary.

Produced by Darlow Smithson Productions for Discovery Channel

Part The Ram

Next, the team tackles the challenge of recreating the ram, modeled on the same weapon used by Roman invaders to batter through ancient city walls in the first century AD. The team, including top military engineers from the U.S. military academy at West Point, recreates a Roman tortoise ram to see if they can demolish a replica of an ancient city wall. The team struggles with local timber supplies as they try to find a massive nine-metre tree trunk for the ramming beam and constructs the huge wheeled “tortoise,” or protective shell, which allows the ram to roll up to a city's walls and remain safe from enemy attack. The 675-kilogram ram head has to be created on site, as the engineers of the Roman army would have done. This means improvising a blacksmith’s forge, which has to reach a temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius, right outside the kasbah or walled fortress where the team is building the ram. Can they build it? And will they be able to breach a six-metre-high 3.5-metre-thick wall?

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