I’d submit that the iklwa has rather more in common with something like a halberd than it does the Roman pilum. It isn’t meant to leave the hands of the combatant wielding it, the combatant doesn’t have a brace of them to “use up” in combat, and he’s pretty much screwed if he does lose it in an opponent’s body.

The Romans had things like the plumbata, which was basically a lawn dart carried on the inner side of their shields, and the afore-mentioned pilum. These were, it may be noted, more munition than hand-weapon, which was something their opponents could ill-afford. The limited metals available to the Germans, for example, militated against expendables like the Romans carried. This was why they had things like the framea, which were iklwa equivalents. Horses for courses…

I didn’t know Graves had done that. Not convinced it was a good choice, but then the Zulus and their assegais probably loomed larger in cultural memory in Britain and when he wrote than they do now, so the word choice would have conveyed an idea of the German weapon’s use. I have no idea if it does so accurately. These days, I’d also cringe at the sloppy and ethnographically confusing choice.

More importantly, I since childhood thought the word assegai had entered English from Zulu, was a Zulu word, and referred only to the Zulu spear.

Go figure. I had no idea the English gave it that name based on a word they already had, let alone a Berber origin word. Now I envision some hapless English soldier in the Tangier garrison under Charles II, speared in the gut and with some bookish comrade looking on studiously and calling the weapon an assegai.