What is the oldest firearm?

Answer 1

It might not look a lot like a firearm. We do not have a museum with an object in a glass case labeled "World's Oldest Gun"- but we can make an educated guess. The oldest would be a small cannon- muzzleloading, smoothbore, black powder, fired from a touch-hole. They were probably made of brass instead of steel, may have shot a stone ball instead of a lead bullet, and were heavy. Some of the very early firearms looked sort of like a squatty metal vase- and the projectile was an arrow. They did not always work, were not very accurate- and sometimes blew up.