Ancient

Weapons are meant to kill or harm living things. Historically speaking, the development of human civilization followed the pace of the evolution of weapons, which stands for the highest level of the current technology.


Stone age.

At ancient times, materials that human being could access to were far limited, which were only ones came directly from nature, like wood, stone, bones, etc. As a half man-made thing, weapons in that time was only used to hunt in order to survive. Wars were only between human being and nature.

The main principle of how to choose weapon material is basically considering the strength and hardness of a material. With these properties people could get work done more efficient.
And also there were tools of combinations of different materials, which was mainly decided by the combinations of good properties of different materials. Take a spear for example, the long wood part was chosen because of the low density, which enabled people to hold for a long time without loosing the attacking distance, while the sharp part was stone. With big hardness, the stone part had the capability to kill animals fast.


Bronze and iron age.

With the development of productive forces, there were enough food for everyone to survive and even some left. As the left things got accumulated, selfish was firstly came up and this led to the fights between man and man, which was "true war" or the war we now defined.

In order to win the war, mankind were forced to invent more powerful weapons. But the renovation of weapons need great society source support, which means the richer a society was, the more advanced weapons they probably own. Of course there were exceptions. Like China in Qing dynastic.

So on this level, the relationship between weapons and the level of society was some how promote each other.

Copper was first smelted around 3,300 B.C., followed quickly by the development of bronze. Iron tools first started to appear in the Near East in the 12th Century B.C., although iron remained relatively expensive for centuries and was often used concurrently with bronze tools. However, first bronze and then iron and steel were major leaps forward in weapon-making, producing arms that were heavier, more durable and kept a sharper edge longer. In addition to these materials improving the killing power of all previous weapons, the era also saw the domestication of the horse. That opened the doors to both cavalry and chariots. Chariots fell out of favor by the 4th Century B.C.; but cavalry would remain important for more than a millennia after that. The ancient world also saw the development of siege weapons that used cables, animal sinew and counterweights to store mechanical power for use in things like trebuchets, catapults, and ballistas. This was also an era that saw a primitive form of napalm, the famous "Greek Fire," come into being.