Obsolete Weapons in the Mahabharata

Abstract

The paper deals with four weapons that appear in the Mahabharata, but are never, or only exceptionally, employed in real combat: plough (hala), wheel/disc (cakra), thunderbolt (vajra) and trident (trisula). In each case, an attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of the weapon is made, the textual and material evidence is examined, and a hypothesis is presented as to how the weapon was imagined by the authors and recipients of the epic.