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
Thracian language (meaning "up") and based on several Thracic items, would have meant "upon", "up", and "Utaspios" is theorized to have meant "On horse(back)", parallel to ancient Greek "ephippos (epi-hippos)". The early Indo-European languages had more than one word for horse; for example Latin had "equus" from PIE "*ekwo-" and "mannus" ("a pony") from another IE root, later receiving "cabalus" as a loanword. In many cases in current Thracology, there is more than one etymology for a Thracian lexical item. For example, Thracian "Diana Germetitha" ("Diana" is from Latin while the epithet "Germetitha" is from Thracian) has two different proposed etymologies, "Diana