sling was probably intended for the departed pharaoh to use for hunting game. Another Egyptian sling was excavated in El-Lahun in Al Fayyum Egypt in 1914 by William Matthew Flinders Petrie, and now resides in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology—Petrie dated it to c. 800 BC. It was found alongside an iron spearhead. The remains are broken into three sections. Although fragile, the construction is clear: it is made of bast fibre (almost certainly flax) twine; the cords are braided in a 10-strand elliptical sennit and the cradle seems to have been woven from the same lengths of twine used to form the cords. Ancient representations Representations of slingers can be found on artifacts from all over the ancient world, including Assyrian and Egyptian reliefs, the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, on coins, and on the Bayeux Tapestry. The oldest representation of a slinger in art may be from Çatalhöyük, from c. 7,000 BC, though it is the only such depiction at the site, despite numerous depictions of archers. Written history Many European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and African peoples were users of slings. Thucydides and others authors talk about its usage by Greeks and Romans, and Strabo also extends it to the Iberians, Lusitanians and even some Gauls (which Caesar describes further in his account of the siege of Bibrax). He also mentions Persians and Arabs among those who used them. For his part, Diodorus includes Libyans and Phoenicians. Britons were frequent users of slings too. Livy mentions the most famous of ancient skillful slingers: the people of the Balearic Islands, who often worked as mercenaries. Of these people Strabo writes: "And their training in the use of slings used to be such, from childhood up, that they would not so much as give bread to their children unless they first hit it with the sling." Classical accounts The sling is mentioned as early as in the writings of Homer, where several characters kill enemies by hurling stones at them. Balearic slingers were amongst the specialist mercenaries extensively employed by Carthage against the Romans and other enemies. These light troops used three sizes of sling, according to the distance of their opponents. The weapons were made of vegetable fibre and animal sinew, launching either stones or lead missiles with devastating impact. Xenophon in his history of the retreat of the Ten Thousand, 401 BC, relates that the Greeks