In reply to:
Thinking about it, even if people didn't go rock climbing for pleasure in the past, i suspect, that anyone who had a skill as doing it, would be a good person to attempt a sneak attach on a castle or fortress. and if people did it, they devised tool and equipment to do it better.
From Plutarch's Life of Crassus:
Afterwards Clodius, the praetor, took the command against them with a body of three thousand men from Rome, and besieged them within a mountain, accessible only by one narrow and difficult passage, which Clodius kept guarded, encompassed on all other sides with steep and slippery precipices. Upon the top, however, grew a great many wild vines, and cutting down as many of their boughs as they had need of, they twisted them into strong ladders long enough to reach from thence to the bottom, by which, without any danger, they got down all but one, who stayed there to throw them down their arms, and after this succeeded in saving himself.
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_plutarch_crassus.htm
(The 'they' btw is Spartacus and his men. I don't remember if this was in the film.)
Alexander the Great's capture of the Sogdian Rock:
There were some 300 men who in previous sieges had had experience in rock-climbing. These now assembled. They had provided themselves with small iron tent-pegs, which they proposed to drive into the snow, where it was frozen hard, or into any bit of bare earth they might come across, and they had attached to the pegs strong flaxen lines. The party set off under cover of darkness to the steepest part of the rock-face, which they knew was least likely to be guarded; then, driving their pegs either into bare ground or into such patches of mow as seemed most likely to hold under the strain, they hauled themselves up, wherever each could find a way. About thirty lost their lives during the ascent -falling in various places in the snow, their bodies were never recovered for burial- but the rest reached the top as dawn was breaking, and the summit of the Rock was theirs.
http://www.livius.org/aj-al/alexander/alexander_t54.html
Bingley
