Ancient Greek military personal equipment event of a broken spear, or if close melee combat was necessary. Hoplites mounted on horseback likely used a heavier, curved sword known as the "kopis", meaning "chopper" in the Greek language. Hand-to-hand, light support troops such as the "psiloi" were often armed with ranged weapons. Popular ranged weapons were the bow ("toxa"), javelin ("akontia") and sling ("sfendonai"). While the bow was a relatively uncommon weapon (the wooden stave bow used had a limited range), some troops treated their arrows by thrusting them into rotting corpses, thus creating a crude form of biological weapon. Peltast troops commonly used javelins, and
Ancient Greek accent agreed with it in gender. Diacritic signs were not used in the classical period (5th–4th century BC). They were gradually introduced from the 2nd century BC onwards, but did not become commonly used in manuscripts until after 600 AD. The ancient Greek accent, at least in nouns, appears to have been inherited to a large extent from the original parent language from which Greek and many other European and Indian languages derive, Proto-Indo-European. This can be seen by comparing the accent of Greek words with the accent of words in the Vedic hymns (the most ancient form of the Sanskrit