CDS (II) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 64 of 120

Correct — B, Catapult. Munjaniq, more usually transliterated manjaniq, is the Arabic and Persian name for the mangonel — a stone-throwing siege engine worked by a team of men pulling on ropes at the short end of a pivoted beam, so that the long end whips a sling forward and hurls a rock at a wall or over it. The word travelled from Greek manganon through Latin into Arabic, and from Arabic into the military vocabulary of the Delhi Sultanate, where chroniclers describe manjaniqs being set up against forts. It belongs to the age before gunpowder: it is a mechanical machine that stores energy in muscle and leverage, and it was the standard heavy siege weapon of the medieval Islamic world until the counterweight trebuchet displaced it.

• (a)Cannon — A cannon throws a projectile with expanding gunpowder gases, which is a completely different principle and a later technology. Gunpowder artillery is associated with the sixteenth century in north India, long after the manjaniq was standard equipment.
• (c)Gun carriage — A gun carriage is the wheeled mounting that carries a gun; the word presupposes the gun, and therefore gunpowder. The manjaniq needed no such thing — it was assembled on site from timber, often out of materials carried or cut nearby.
• (d)Portable armoury — A portable armoury is a store of weapons, not a weapon. Nothing in the term's history connects it to storage; every chronicle use has the manjaniq throwing something.

Medieval siege warfare turned on machines that could break or overtop a wall. The traction trebuchet, called manjaniq in Arabic and Persian, used a crew hauling on ropes to swing a beam and sling; the later counterweight trebuchet replaced the crew with a heavy falling box and threw much larger stones. Alongside these sat the arradah, a lighter stone-thrower, battering rams, scaling ladders and mining under the walls. Gunpowder artillery arrived only at the end of this sequence and did not immediately displace it.

Unfamiliar technical terms from Persian chronicles are a recurring CDS habit, and they are usually solvable by etymology or by period. Here the period does the work: the stem itself says medieval, and gunpowder weapons are a late-medieval and early-modern arrival in India, so the two options that presuppose a gun can be set aside at once. That leaves a throwing machine against a storehouse, and a term that appears repeatedly in accounts of sieges is far more likely to name the machine doing the besieging. The examiners clearly like this word — it returns in the 2025 paper, where the correct option spells the answer out as a device for throwing stones.

• Manjaniq is the Arabic name of the mangonel, a traction trebuchet worked by a pulling crew.
• The word descends from Greek manganon by way of Late Latin manganum.
• It was the standard heavy stone-throwing engine of medieval Islamic siege warfare, superseded by the counterweight trebuchet by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
• Arabic sources also call the same engine arrada, shaytani or sultani.
• It is a pre-gunpowder machine — the energy comes from human muscle and leverage, not from a propellant charge.

• Reading any medieval siege term as a gun; gunpowder artillery is a later layer in Indian military history.
• Confusing the traction trebuchet with the counterweight trebuchet — both are stone-throwers, but the power source differs.
• Treating a device word as a place or an office; Persian and Arabic technical terms in the sources cover all three.

As a define-the-term item on a Persian or Arabic military word, sometimes with the modern equivalent supplied in brackets in one of the options.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The counterweight trebuchet differs from the traction trebuchet mainly in that it

  • (a)uses a falling weight instead of a pulling crew to swing the beam
  • (b)fires an explosive charge
  • (c)is mounted on a wheeled carriage
  • (d)throws arrows rather than stones

  Answer(a) uses a falling weight instead of a pulling crew to swing the beam — which let it throw far heavier stones.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Gunpowder field artillery is generally associated with which one of the following events in north Indian military history?

  • (a)The first battle of Tarain
  • (b)The first battle of Panipat
  • (c)The siege of Ranthambhor by Alauddin Khalji
  • (d)The battle of Chandawar

  Answer(b) The first battle of Panipat — Babur's use of guns marks the arrival of gunpowder artillery on the north Indian battlefield.