Cateia
The possible employment of the boomerang in Europe has been made the subject of occasional speculation amongst antiquarian writers. Having been used in Egypt, and perhaps in Assyria, there is no good reason for doubting that it may have spread from thence to the north-west. In a learned paper on the subject in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xix (1843), § ‘Literature,’ p. 22, Pl. i, ii, Mr. Samuel Ferguson endeavours to prove that the ‘cateia’ mentioned by classical authors was the boomerang. He quotes several passages, and amongst them one from Virgil (Aeneid vii. 741), in which mention is made of a people accustomed to whirl the ‘cateia’ after the Teutonic manner. In the Punica of Silius (iii. 327), one of the Libyan tribes which accompanied Hannibal to Italy is described as being armed with a bent or crooked ‘cateia’. Isidore, Bishop of Seville, a writer of the end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century, described the ‘cateia’ as ‘a species of bat, which, when thrown, flies not far, by reason of its weight, but where it strikes, it breaks through with extreme impetus, and if it be thrown with a skilful hand, it returns back again to him who dismissed it’ (Origines, xviii. 7. 7).
Strabo also (pp. 196-7) describes the Belgae of his time, as using ‘a wooden weapon of the shape of a grosphus, which they throw out of hand... which flies farther than an arrow, and is chiefly used in the pursuit of game’.