A sarissa
Alexander's foot soldiers carried a pike two or three times the length of an ordinary Greek spear. It needed both hands, so the shield hung from the shoulder, so the man beside you had to hold his place. Nobody agrees exactly how long it was, because the ancient figures are in cubits and nobody agrees on the cubit either.
How long
Two ancient writers give figures, a century and a half apart.
Theophrastus lived through Alexander's reign. Describing a tree, he says it grows to twelve cubits at most, "the length of the longest sarissa". Polybius, writing in the second century BC, gives sixteen cubits as the original design and fourteen as what was carried in his day. A cubit was very roughly 45 centimetres, but which cubit each man meant is itself argued, so modern estimates run from about five and a half metres to about seven. This card gives a range because the evidence gives a range.
A tree that is not a spear
You will often read that the sarissa was made of cornel wood, citing Theophrastus. Read him closely and he is using the sarissa as a ruler to measure a cornel tree. He does not say the sarissa was made from it. It may have been; he just is not the evidence for it.
What survives
The iron head and the heavy iron butt-spike, which also balanced the pike and let it be planted in the ground. The long wooden shaft is gone, which is why the length has to be worked out from texts at all.
- Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants 3.12.2: a tree twelve cubits tall, 'the length of the longest sarissa'
- Polybius 18.29.2: sixteen cubits in the original design, fourteen in practice in his own day
- Markle, 'The Macedonian Sarissa, Spear, and Related Armor', American Journal of Archaeology 81.3 (1977)
- Picture: made with AI for The Ember Atlas, an imagining, not a record of how it looked.