Duncan B. Campbell

At any rate, sophisticated siege machinery first appeared in the classical world in the hands of the Carthaginians, a people who traced their ancestry back to the Middle East. In the closing years of the 5th century BC, they deployed wheeled siege towers and battering rams against a string of Greek town on Sicily. The experience prompted the ruler of neighbouring Syracuse, Dionysius I, to invest in his own siege-train, so he assembled a skilled workforce from all over Mediterranean world and, by the year 399 BC, he possessed siege towers and battering rams, along with another weapon destined to play an important role in siege warfare: the catapult.