Did only Greeks/Romans use tridents (For weapons and fishing) or are they found in other cultures as well?

by OpenNHonest4

I was reading about how the sea deity, Olokun is often portrayed as having a trident, lik eother sea gods Poseiodon and Neptune, etc.

But Olokun is an African deity and I cannot tell if this is a result of European interaction that came later (As in people are NOW portraying him with a trident) or if it was always like that because the Yoruba people used tridents?

wotan_weevil

Three-pointed and two-pointed spears have been used as weapons elsewhere. I gave some European and Chinese examples in

In addition to those, tridents similar to the Chinese examples were used in Vietnam, and tridents were used as military weapons in Korea:

Tridents are common from South Asia (India and Nepal), continental South-East Asia, and Indonesia; these owe much to Shiva's use of the trident (or trisula, or trishula), and combine being functional weapons with religious or mystic/magical symbols and ceremonial weapons

Two- and three-pointed spears were also used in Iran. Many of the relatively recent Qajar examples are purely parade/ceremonial weapons, not sharp and not intended to ever be sharpened; earlier ones could be serious weapons. Similar tridents and bidents were used in the Sudan, by the Mahdists, in imitation of the Iranian style:

this example being a symbol of authority rather than a fighting weapon.

There are also many examples of two- and three-pointed spears from Ethiopia. This example:

was carried by royal bodyguards.

Multi-pronged spears are common for fishing in many places around the world. Often, they can be distinguished from fighting weapons because they are barbed (throwing spears intended for fighting are often barbed, but spears intended for hand-to-hand fighting are rarely barbed). The head is more often made up of spikes rather than blades, and there are sometimes many more than three spikes. Sometimes the spikes are arranged in a bundle, and sometimes in a plane (like a trident). Some examples:

With regards to your question about Olokun, I don't know of any Yoruba examples, but it is quite possible that the Yoruba used multi-pronged spears, since they were used elsewhere in West Africa and in the Congo basin. From West Africa, from the Bissagos Islands (Guinea-Bissau):

From the Fon people, Togo:

What appears to be a fishing spear, from Mali:

From the Congo basin:

From Cameroon:

At first glance, most of the trident-bearing images of Olokun have a very Greco-Roman style of trident, and appear to owe much more to depictions of Neptune/Poseidon than to West African tridents.

Reference:

Most of the African examples above are from the excellent collection of images of African weapons and ethnographica at http://www.africanarms.com/