The Periodic Table of Weapons

The Periodic Table of Weapons began as a design experiment: could the full sweep of human weaponry be organized into a single, readable format? The answer turned out to be a 36-by-24-inch illustrated poster that catalogs over 50 weapons across five historical epochs, from the first stone tools to modern firearms.

Most of the weapon artwork comes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's public-domain collection. The Met has a large arms and armor department, and their Open Access policy made the images free to use. A few weapons not in the Met's collection were sourced from other public-domain archives.

The poster arranges weapons chronologically within five epochs: the Ancient Age, the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Age, and the Modern Age. Within each epoch, weapons are grouped by type -- edged, blunt, ranged, siege, and firearms.

The project was originally published in May 2017 by Verge Studios and sold as a limited print run on glossy stock. This site is the permanent home for the project -- the weapon illustrations are available here as desktop wallpapers, and the full historical narrative from the poster is reproduced in the epochs section.