 These included the "sambuca", a floating siege tower with grappling hooks, as well as ship-mounted scaling ladders that were lowered with pulleys onto the city walls.Despite these novel inventions, Archimedes devised defensive devices to counter the Roman efforts including a huge crane operated hook – the Claw of Archimedes – that was used to lift the enemy ships out of the sea before dropping them to their doom.Legend has it that he also created a giant mirror (see heat ray) that was used to deflect the powerful Mediterranean sun onto the ships' sails, setting fire to them.