Young Brunette Girl Shows Off On The Cannon

The earliest known cannon, though not driven by gunpowder, was invented by Ctesibius of Alexandria, in the 3rd century BC. Little is known about this primitive invention—as most of Ctesibius' works were lost—but it was noted by Philo of Byzantium that it operated using compressed air. Like firearms, cannon are a descendant of the fire lance, a gunpowder-filled tube attached to the end of a spear and used as a flamethrower in China. Shrapnel was sometimes placed in the barrel, so that it would fly out along with the flames. Eventually, the paper and bamboo of which fire lance barrels were originally constructed came to be replaced by metal. It has been disputed at which point flame-projecting cannon were abandoned in favor of missile-projecting ones, as words meaning either incendiary or explosive are commonly translated as gunpowder. The earliest known depiction of a gun is a sculpture from a cave in Sichuan, dating to the 12th century, that portrays a figure carrying a vase-shaped bombard, firing flames and a ball. The oldest surviving gun, dated to 1288, has a muzzle bore diameter of 2.5 cm (1 in); the second oldest, dated to 1332, has a muzzle bore diameter of 10.5 cm (4 in).
The first documented battlefield use of gunpowder artillery took place on January 28, 1132, when Song General Han Shizhong used huochong to capture a city in Fujian. The world's earliest known cannon, dated 1282, was found in Mongol-held Manchuria. The first known illustration of a cannon is dated to 1326. In his 1341 poem, The Iron Cannon Affair, one of the first accounts of the use of gunpowder artillery in China, Xian Zhang wrote that a cannonball fired from an eruptor could "pierce the heart or belly when it strikes a man or horse, and can even transfix several persons at once."
Joseph Needham suggests that the proto-shells described in the Huolongjing may be among the first of their kind. The Chinese also mounted over 3,000 cast bronze and iron cannon on the Great Wall of China, to defend themselves from the Mongols. The weapon was later taken up by both the Mongol conquerors and the Koreans. Chinese soldiers fighting under the Mongols appear to have used hand cannon in Manchurian battles during 1288, a date deduced from archaeological findings at battle sites.