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[Administration]

The wild boar charged from the bush, running blindly. When he spotted the man, he swerved violently, his stubby legs churning the dust. Raising his bow to his shoulder, the man planted his feet firmly and waited. He would have time for no more than one shot. It had to be placed in a mortal spot. At 30 feet the hunter could see the angry eyes, red with fury, and hear the brittle clash of the beast's long tusks. As the boar snapped wide his mouth and began his rush for the man's leg, the hunter smoothly pulled back on the taut drawstring. He aimed for the flat of the head above the eyes and let go.

The drama between the hunter and the hunted in this scene might well have been played out 10,000 years ago when the bow and arrow was a relatively new way for man to kill at a distance. But it actually occurred only a few years ago. Howard Hill, one of America's most skilled bow and arrow hunters, killed the wild boar on Santa Cruz Island, off the California coast. Hill is not unique among hunters in the choice of his weapon. An estimated two million hunters in America alone still stalk their quarry with one of man's most primitive weapons.

Science does not know just how primitive the bow and arrow is or exactly where it was first used. Beautiful Paleolithic carvings in caves at Castellon, Spain indicate that the weapon is at least 10,000 years old. But like the first smelting and forging of iron, bows and arrows were used simultaneously in many different areas of the world. Wherever and whenever it did appear, its use marked a step up in civilization. With the bow, man gained greater control over his food supply and better protection against his enemies.

The bow's importance in man's life gave rise to fanciful legend. "The Arab bow," says one old manuscript, "is that which God sent down to Adam from Paradise," and the skill of Apollo and his twin sister Diana as hunters was rivaled only by the mischievous Cupid from whose arrows no lover could escape. Odysseus, home from his voyages, rescued Penelope from her unwanted suitors by a feat of extraordinary marksmanship.

Odysseus' skill remains a legend, but recorded history following Homer shows the gradual rise of the bow from a single-shot device with which man hunted his own food or protected his shores against marauding neighbors to a tactical weapon of war. Succeeding civilizations of Babylonians, Assyrians and Chinese used it as mass artillery to subdue their enemies. When Darius invaded Greece, his army contained thousands of archers from Persia, Arabia, Ethiopia, Media?each using the bow native to his own land. Here, in one army, was a rich tapestry of archers representing a large part of the known world of 500 B. C.

A thousand years later, Attila and his Huns became the first of a succession of horse archers to emerge from central Asia and conquer vast empires. Because the steppes of central Asia offered the expansive, treeless plains in which the bow and arrow were most successfully employed, it was here that the weapon reached its widest use and took on a different shape. A lack of suitable wood and the need for a shorter bow that could be used more accurately by mounted archers led to the design of a composite bow made of horn and other materials. Tamerlane, laid to rest in his ebony coffin at Samarkand in 1450, was the last of the great Asian warriors who employed nomad horse archers.

A single arrow was a harbinger of the bow's importance in English history. When the Duke of Normandy invaded Britain in 1066 and engaged the Saxon king, Harold, at Hastings, he found himself unable to penetrate the wall of Saxon shields. Toward sunset, in a brilliant stroke of desperation, he ordered his archers to shoot high in the air and drop their arrows behind the Saxon shields. One single drop in that rain of death mortally wounded Harold in the eye, and the Norman conqueror charged through the leaderless enemy troops to victory.

The Norman invaders had used short bows drawn to the chest. Some time later the English bow lengthened, and archers began to draw to the cheek. Their greater power and accuracy, epitomized by the legendary Robin Hood, were to be seen in skillful reality in the English foot soldier-archer. The longbow won battles against tremendous odds for English commanders in the centuries following the Norman invasion, its usefulness reaching a climax in English warfare at Agincourt. In this French village in 1415, Henry V and 6,000 archers sought to win the crown of France from Marshal d'Albret and 20,000 Frenchmen.

The French were drawn up in close order in three lines. With a cry for "St. George and Merrie England," Henry's archers loosed a storm of arrows and advanced to within 300 yards of the French lines. Each archer quickly planted his pointed stake in front of him for protection against the French cavalry.

The French cavalry, goaded by the arrows, foolishly countercharged. Held tightly in formation by the woods on each side of the valley through which they charged, they made an easy target for Henry's archers. With deadly accuracy Henry's bowmen felled most of the French front line. Survivors fell back in disorder, trampling their own reserve line.

French camp followers and peasantry then broke into Henry's rear guard to pillage. Mistakenly fearing he was now being attacked on two sides, Henry gave orders to kill all French prisoners so that his men could fight the new attack unhampered. Seeing the massacre, the French third line fled the field. The army of English foot soldiers with bows had destroyed an army three times its own size and won the prize of France for Henry!

At Agincourt the bow and arrow reached its zenith as a military weapon. Elsewhere in Asia and the Mediterranean men were experimenting with a curious compound of saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur. The introduction of gunpowder in the sixteenth century revolutionized warfare and put bowmen on the retired list.

On the American continent the woodland Indian tribes of the East, the buffalo hunters of the West and the coastal tribes used the bow to battle nature for their food and shelter. Bow wood was limited to what the land could supply?shagbark hickory, ash and white oak in the East; osage orange and cottonwood in the West. Bowstrings were usually made from deer or buffalo tendons or the skin of a snapping turtle's neck.

Early settlers found out the painful way that the Indian was a skillful adversary, but not because of the quality of his bows and arrows. The Indian's skill lay in woodcraft?no modern archer can approach him in the ability to stalk his quarry and kill it. Although some Indians, like the Seminoles, had powerful bows that were almost young trees, the weapons of many tribes were short-ranged and inaccurate by modem standards.

As a basic weapon, the bow and arrow is still popular. Primitive tribes of South America use it to this day to secure food and drive off enemies. Other tribesmen of Asia and Africa hunt animals the same way their ancestors did thousands of years ago. The U. S. Army recently experimented with the bow and arrow as a simple, light and silent weapon for guerilla warfare. For the most part, however, present-day bow and arrow marksmen are either target archers or sportsmen-hunters.

Some modem bows are still made of wood?western yew, osage orange or degame?but most are constructed of various composites of wood, fiberglass, steel and plastic. Target bows require a pulling power of 20 to 60 pounds; hunting bows require 50 to 100 pounds. The old English rule was that a bow should be as tall as the man using it and his arrows half the length of the bow. Modern archers select their five to six-foot bows to match their arrows, the length of which is based on the archer's "drawing length"?the distance between the base of the neck and the tip of the fingers. The arrows must be carefully crafted so that they do not "flirt"?swerve from their true flight line. Both wood and metal shafts are used, tipped with steel or brass and feathered with torn turkey feathers or plastic.

Although new materials are used and although its appearance and power have been transformed many times over during its long, long history, the bow and arrow has stubbornly resisted obsolescence. Like the wheel or the lever and fulcrum, the basic idea of the bow and arrow was so practical?and simple?that it's highly unlikely that it will ever become nothing more than an artifact of the past relegated to dusty corners in museums. Many of man's brightest ideas become curiosity pieces once the world passes them by. With 10,000 years or more of use behind it, the bow and arrow is definitely not destined to be one of them.

This article appeared on pages 18-19 of the January 1962 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

[Administration]

Written by Lee Lawrence

An unfinished bow rests in the grip of a vise in a workshop near the small town of Grand Rapids, Ohio. On a nearby work table is a litter of sanding blocks, large-toothed metal combs, wads of steel wool, rolls of masking tape, wrenches, chisels and files. From a pipe overhead hangs a stalac-tite of orange-tipped clamps. In the center of the chaos sits Bubba, a longhaired gray cat with a body as massive as his appetite for attention.

It is here, under Bubba?s watch-ful eye, that Lukas Novotny is crafting what he hopes will be a bow "in which superlative performance is combined with an unsurpassed grace and beauty ? lightness and hardiness"?the dream of modern bowyers. Trained as a glass artisan in the former Czechoslovakia, Novotny emigrated to the United States in 1982; jars of colorful pieces of glass crowd the shelves behind him. Among them, though, are the materials of his present career: a curl of buffalo horn protruding from a top shelf, a slim quiver bristling with arrows standing nearby and, directly in front of the shelves, racks full of row upon row of bows. A slim 32 to 76 millimeters wide (1? to 3'') but ranging up to 132 centimeters long (52''), they extend as gracefully as a ballerina?s arms.

These are Novotny?s reconstructions of Asian composite recurved bows, so named because they are composed of several materials and because, when strung, the curve of the limbs reverses at the tips. Elegant and light, they are masterpieces of engineering, contemporary products of an ancient craft that has, time and again, changed the course of history.

Like most great inventions, the composite recurved bow was the culmination of a long technological evolution. Humans had been hunting and warring with simple wooden bows for more than 30,000 years when, about the third millennium BC, bowyers from Mesopotamia to Japan independently began experimenting with ways to enhance their bows? springing action by introducing other materials: They applied horn to the side of the bow facing the archer, the side in compression when the bow is drawn, and they applied animal sinew to the outward side, which is in tension. In the process, they reduced the wooden element of the bow to a slim core whose sole role was to keep the sinew and the horn aligned.

The next development was the discovery that, by training the tips of the bow?s limbs to curve forward, in the opposite direction of the draw?the "recurve" of the recurved design?both the power and the accuracy of the bow could be increased still more, though at the cost of making it harder to draw. And over the life of the bow, as it gradually lost its spring action, the bowyers found that reheating its limbs and gently restoring its original curve also restored its original power.

Asia?s long-standing preference for the bow over the sword, mace and other weapons favored by Europeans up through the 15th century is credited with helping shape and reshape the political boundaries of the Old World. In 546 BC, Persian archers overcame Lydian mounted lancers and, in battles against Babylonians, Egyptians and Greeks, they often prevailed over the opposition?s infantry. Much later, in a famous conflict between the Roman army and the Parthians in 64 BC, it was what military historian E. G. Heath called "the never-failing quiver" that thwarted the eastward advance of the Roman Empire. It was not that the Romans ignored archery?they simply considered it of secondary importance and thus failed to perfect archery equipment or tactics. The Byzantines, on the other hand, valued archery, and this had something to do with the fact that Byzantium outlived the Roman Empire by about 1000 years. When its fall began with the battle of Malazgirt in 1071, it was to the Seljuk Turks, who were true masters of the bow.

Every historical work on archery speaks of the legendary Persian archer said to have shot an arrow through a five-centimeter (2'') thickness of brass, and of Ottoman Sultan Selim III who, in 1788, personally set a still unsurpassed distance record of 888.80 meters, or 963 yards?farther than the best modern bow can shoot. In literature, the bow became associated with great heroes as a virtual extension of their bodies?an idea that is not in fact farfetched, since the archer, in drawing the bow, transfers energy from his body into the body of the bow, where it is stored until he releases it to the arrow. Rustem, the hero of Firdawsi?s 11th-century Persian epic the Shahnama (Book of Kings ), thus literally uses his final breath to shoot his enemy through the heart.

In Islam, too, the bow holds a special place. It is the weapon the Archangel Gabriel handed down to Adam, the one God commanded the Prophet Muhammad to use. Some 40 hadith ("traditions," or recorded sayings and stories about the Prophet) focus on archery as a way to strengthen both body and soul, and while some hadith encourage metaphorical interpretations, others led to the establishment of archery instruction as fundamental to physical fitness. In 1835 the Ottoman ruler Mahmud II had both aspects in mind when he commanded his courtier Kani to set down in writing all available information about archery. He was doing this, he announced, "so that under my royal patronage novices may acquire complete knowledge of the sunna [the example] of the Prophet, and by diligence come to possess the degrees of both worlds."

Two hadith specifically mention the Arab bow, commonly interpreted as referring to a composite bow?though some scholars believe that the earliest Muslim warriors from the Arabian Peninsula used simple bows until they gained the know-how to construct composites from conquered lands such as Syria. Indeed, a bow considered to have belonged to Muhammad, now in Istanbul?s Topkapı Museum, is made of bamboo. Nevertheless, by the time the hadith were codified in the eighth century, the bow used by Muslims had long been the composite bow, in which the wood was said to correspond to bone, the horn to flesh, the sinews to arteries and the glue to blood.

Just as each of these tissues plays a different role in the workings of the body, each of the bow?s elements has a similarly specific function. "The sinew takes the tension," Novotny explains. "The horn on the belly takes the compression, and in the middle, the wood takes the shear stress. It?s a simple premise, but if you don?t get the details right," he warns, "you?ll have problems." After all, when drawn, the bending portions of the bow bear some 175 kilograms of pressure per square centimeter (2400 lb/sq in). If the belly cannot stand the compression, it buckles, and if the back of the bow cannot bear the stretch, it pulls apart. "At first," Novotny confesses, "most of the bows I made broke."

Early bowyers no doubt experienced similar failures in the development of recurved composite designs, but thanks to trade in peacetime and the capture of weapons in wartime, technology was rapidly diffused as bowyers over wide areas influenced each other. "The cultural exchange was incredible," Novotny says with enthusiasm. "We have an idea of what a typical bow from each culture looked like, but at the same time, there could be any variation in between."

While Persians, Parthians, Turks, Mongols, Mughals and others all had highly developed traditions, most archers today consider Turkish bows of the late 1700?s and 1800?s to be the high-water mark of the Asian composite bow. After that time, firearms began to dominate the battlefield, fewer and fewer people had time for archery as sport, and the bowyer?s art declined. "There were probably a few people alive who knew how to make composite bows until World War II," Novotny speculates. "But unfortunately, nobody in Turkey today, at least to my knowledge, knows how to build them. It took only one generation to lose the knowledge entirely."

The desire to recover and rediscover that knowledge has turned into an all-consuming passion for Novotny, who over the last decade gradually gave up glass to dedicate himself full-time to researching and making bows professionally. He began by reading a book on North American bows and, being an avid horseman himself, tried his hand at making the short horn-and-sinew bows that Plains Indian tribes used for hunting buffalo. "But always in the back of my mind," he says, "was the history I grew up with in Czechoslovakia?of Turks invading Europe and besieging Vienna."

He said as much to bow expert Tim Baker, whom he met by chance in California in 1992, a time Baker remembers as "the zenith of the reconstruction of Asian composite bows." Their aficionados, he adds, laughing, were "one of the smallest minority groups in the universe."

What the group lacked in numbers, it more than made up for in dedication, as Novotny discovered when Baker put him in touch with Jeff Schmidt, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin. For two years, Schmidt too had been researching Asian composite bows, and he was well known in archery circles for his extensive library of books in English, Russian and Persian and his files bulging with thousands of photocopied papers. But more than that, Novotny says, "he had all the technical know-how."

Like Novotny, Schmidt had started out reading books, scouring bibliographies and tracking down every piece of writing he thought might contain useful information. One discovery was a book published in London in 1970, Saracen Archery: An English Version and Exposition of a Mameluke Work on Archery, in which authors J. D. Latham and W. F. Paterson explicate a 14th-century Arabic treatise in verse titled Kitab Ghunyat at-Tullab fi Ma?rifat Ramy al-Nushshab, loosely translated as Essential Archery for Beginners . The text had been written at a time when the Mamluks had convincingly demonstrated the prowess of their archers by repelling the Mongol assault on Egypt and Syria in 1260. It provided basic data on bow construction, supplemented with information gleaned from other early texts and with observations derived from the author?s own experimentation.

Saracen Archery showed that the wooden core of the composite bow was made of five elements: the handle in the center, two limbs (dustars) on either side and the curved tips (siyahs) that are either attached to or made as part of the dustars . In either case, the tips do not flex; they taper sharply to the nocks, where the string is attached. In many bows, the siyah simply extends the curve of the dustar, but early bowyers introduced the famous recurve that gave the bows their familiar, wave-like shape, their greater capacity for tension and their greater power. These were the bows that Novotny wanted to build.

To make the core, Novotny selects pieces of American hard rock maple, the closest match he can find locally for the fine-grained maple favored by Turkish bowyers. Like them, he carves the handle into a gently rounded form, oval in cross-section, that fits comfortably in the hand, the fingers curling around the swell and back toward the palm. To provide a firm grip, however, the handle must not be so small that the fingers reach around to the palm?that would create, in effect, a bearing in which the bow could swivel.

Most bows made with dustars and siyahs as single elements are Turkish. To make them, Novotny cuts 76-centimeter (30'') sections of wood and soaks them in cold water for three days. Then he steams the two pieces into curves of some 60 degrees. For bows in which the dustars and siyahs are separate elements, typically known as Persian five-element bows, he steams the dustars into a gentle curve and finds branches growing at the desired angle for the siyahs. To assemble the parts, he tapers both ends of the handle and, if needed, the ends of the siyahs. He then cuts V-shaped splices into the dustars and, after brushing on glue, fits the pieces snugly to form a strong, undetectable joint.

Next comes the horn; Novotny uses water-buffalo horn. He prepares it by shaving off the surface ridges, cutting it roughly to size, then steaming and flattening it. He can now shave the horn until he has twin strips of uniform thickness the width of the wood core. He glues the horn strips onto the bow?s belly so they meet in the center of the handle. Then he winds a rope around the bow using a traditional tool called, in Turkish, a tepelik . Unlike modern clamps, the tepelik creates an even pressure along the curve, squeezing out excess glue. The bow is now left to dry for several weeks with its ends tied to maintain a soft curve.

The sinew requires even longer preparation. Novotny buys whole tendons from a slaughterhouse and here departs from tradition in that he uses acetone to degrease them instead of the highly carcinogenic naphtha that was used in the past. But he does so only because both are equally effective. "If the glue joint has a speck of grease on it," Novotny explains, "it?ll fail, because grease and glue do not mix, and there will be a speck where there is no glue." In highly stressed bows, an unglued speck is enough to introduce a fatal weakness.

Once the sinew is dry, Novotny breaks it up with his fingers and combs through it with a metal brush. The sinew is now a mass of long, thick fibers, which he dips in hot hide glue before laying them on the bow. "I use five different lengths of sinew," he explains. "Through the bending portion, you always use the long fibers; the shorter pieces are for building up around the handle area and along the sides, and they get overlapped and staggered like bricks."

He applies the sinew in two or three courses, each containing three to four layers. After the first course, he lets the bow dry a couple of weeks to allow the sinew to shrink. As the fibers shorten, they force the limbs to curve in on themselves, a process Novotny encourages by tying a string between the siyahs and twisting it as the sinew contracts. This is the beginning of a process that ultimately gives the bow its strength: It is tantamount to instilling the memory of a particular curve into the fibers of the horn, sinew and wood so that, when Novotny later bends the bow in the opposite direction to string it, every cell of the bow will want to spring back. The tension increases when Novotny pulls the bow into full draw, so that upon release the bow?s fibers snap back, unleashing an explosion of energy.

But before that happens, there is still much to do. Novotny applies a second course of sinew, after which he again dries the bow, this time in a heat box. When the limbs are malleable, he reflexes them even more sharply, tying the siyahs so close together they almost touch. After laying the final course of sinew, he follows the same procedure, this time crossing the limbs all the way over the center until the bow looks like a pretzel. "Then you leave it in that form for about a year, minimum. You see," he explains, "hide glue only reaches its full strength after 10 years."

By now the bow has been curved so much that the two pieces of horn on its belly no longer meet in the center of the handle. Novotny cuts a sliver of hardwood or bone?"can?t use ivory any more"?and inserts it in the tiny gap. Finally, he covers the sinew side with strips of white birch bark that have been soaked for a year in seawater. Sometimes he uses leather instead,and often he paints on it a decoration appropriate to the type of bow he has made. Jeff Schmidt, on his bows, took this a step further, learning Persian in order to select appropriate verses of poetry to decorate his bows.

From the time Novotny cuts the wood to the day he declares a bow complete, a year and a half has usually elapsed, some of it spent testing the bow, adjusting it, and testing it again. He is often seen astride his horse, bow in hand, and at least twice a day he steps outside his studio to shoot arrows into stacked bales of cornhusks. The setting in rural Ohio is so bucolic, and Novotny?s gestures so assured, that every step looks self-evident, straightforward, easy. Yet nothing could be more deceptive. With no master bowyer to guide them, archers today have had to learn from bows in museums and from old texts, neither of which tell a complete story.

A composite bow can only reveal its full range of secrets if you take it apart, and for the best bows, invariably in museums and private historical collections, this is clearly not an option. Neither is stringing old bows and testing them, since there is no way to assess whether or not they could now withstand the tension. While damaged bows can be taken apart without as many qualms, they yield information only about the final product, and thus there is little to help understand the process. As for the texts, they focus mostly on shooting techniques, and the chapters on construction often prove to be mixed blessings: In some cases, the author was not a bowyer himself and thus did not always understand what the bowyers were telling him. In other cases, the author assumed knowledge that has long disappeared. And like any skilled craftsmen, Novotny points out, bowyers guarded their secrets.

For example, for all its precise pointers on assemblage and materials, Saracen Archery does not provide exact dimensions for bows. Its units of measurement are not standardized, and many of the proportions are expressed in terms of a man?s anatomy, yet there is no telling just what size that man is.

When Jeff Schmidt, who stands nearly two meters tall (6' 6''), built a bow using measurements based on his own body, it had a "preposterous" draw of 90 kilograms (200 lb): It was impossible to draw. This is because doubling the thickness of the bow increases its stiffness by a factor of eight.

Undeterred, Schmidt kept searching. He found in the second edition of Paul Ernest Klopsteg?s self-published 1947 book Turkish Archery and the Composite Bow not only the findings Kani compiled for Mahmud II, but also the results of Klopsteg?s 15 years of experimentation, which yielded dimensions that "actually worked." Then Schmidt heard about a bowyer named John McPherson, a Kansan who was making highly recurved Native American bows of horn and sinew. Schmidt spent a summer with McPherson learning the ways horn and sinew behave. By trial and error, Schmidt refined his bows? proportions and determined which materials worked best: The Achilles tendons from cattle, he discovered, provided the best sinew, and water buffalo provided the best horn?even though some texts recommended goat and antelope.

It was just about this time, in the fall of 1992, that Novotny showed up on his doorstep with "some really good North American Indian bows," says Schmidt, who confesses he was "shocked and disappointed because mine were so crude by comparison."

By now, Schmidt recalls, "there was a network of about 20 people working on this. We called each other about once a day." It is impossible to chronicle how this geographically diffuse, informal "bowyer?s club" solved each problem its members encountered, but one example imparts their experience of collaboration and dedication. The question was how best to glue the horn to the wood. Fish-bladder glue, they knew, is stronger than hide glue, but according to some texts, Turkish bowyers favored glue made from the roof of a sturgeon?s mouth, not its bladder. When this proved unsuccessful, the bowyers decided there might be some ambiguity?intentional or not?in the texts. So, it was back to simmering fish bladders at 65 degrees Celsius (150? F). But these results, too, proved unsatisfactory. "Someone in the group called a chemist in New York who made hide glue," Schmidt recalls. "And the chemist told us that the molecular weight of the fish-bladder glue was high and it was therefore difficult for it to penetrate into horn." The solution was to dilute the stronger fish glue with the weaker but more penetrating hide glue.

Now they faced another conundrum: How thick should the glue line be? Too thin and the seal might not hold. Too thick and the seal might rupture. Enter Wayne Alex, an Alaskan bowyer who knew a collector who had X-rayed bows and reported that the wood and horn bore minute longitudinal grooves. As Novotny subsequently discovered, this grooving is sometimes light, just enough to roughen the surfaces. But on shorter bows that are more highly stressed, the grooving runs deeper, increasing the contact surface for the glue by some 40 percent.

Schmidt set about constructing scrapers of a type Novotny still uses. Some have short, triangular teeth, with which he roughens up the wood and horn. Others have longer teeth, five to eight per centimeter, with which Novotny scores the horn and wood. It is this "hand control," he says, that Schmidt most admires in Novotny?s work. "Lukas," he says, "is by a long shot the most technically skilled when it comes to fabrication."

Today, Novotny also stands out as one of the rare few to remain dedicated to uncovering the secrets of the earliest composite bowyers. While Baker, Schmidt and others have since turned to other pursuits, Novotny has imparted what he knows to engineer Tony Horvat, with whom he established Saluki Bows. To support his passion for traditional bows, he makes and sells less labor-intensive bows of fiberglass and other modern materials. And he continues to research. About four years ago, after examining the cross-section of a bow in a German museum, Novotny changed the shape of his composite bows? cores from flat to rounded, and he built up the sinew at the ends. More recently, he tracked down a copy of an out-of-print Turkish book on archery whose author recently died but whose papers and source materials Novotny believes might be available through his daughter.

He also remains committed to replicating as exactly as possible the materials Persian and Turkish bowyers used. He puzzles over recurring references in texts to the use of neck sinew: Nobody here has been able to make it work. "A truck driver from Florida read an article about me and called to tell me his grandfather taught him to make bows in the 1920?s in Istanbul. He kept mentioning sinew from the neck. Is it faulty memory?" Novotny wonders. "Or is there really some way to use this sinew?" And just as he hunted down a supply of suitable water-buffalo horn in Thailand three years ago, he wants one day to find the exact kind of maple described by Kani and others.

Baker, however, considers such concern over materials "mythologized." Materials, he maintains, "only account for 10 percent of the bow?s success"?the rest is design. But while Novotny agrees that design is paramount, he remains curious and respectful of the centuries of experience that went into determining just the best time to cut the sapling and even on which side of a hill to grow it. "I have made some very strong bows," Novotny says, "but I still think I can make them perform much better if I really attain the right materials."

Until then, the quest for the modern equivalent of the recurved composite bows that shaped centuries of history continues, "as much a frustration as a passion."

Lee Lawrence is a free-lance writer specializing in the cultures of Asia. She lives in Washington, D.C.

David H. Wells (www.davidhwells.com ) is a free-lance editorial, commercial and documentary photographer living in Providence, Rhode Island. He recently completed an Alicia Patterson Fellowship project photographing the emerging middle classes in India.

[Administration]

Written by Lee Lawrence

Simple bows ("self-bows") are what most people think of when they think of bows. Some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, humans took a strip of wood and tied its ends together with a taut string to create the first weapon that could store energy. The premise is simple: The archer pulls back on the string, drawing the bow to a smaller radius curve. When the archer lets go of the string, the energy stored in the bow transfers to the arrow, casting it faster and farther than the archer?s hand could throw it.

Longbows are made of one or more pieces of wood?typically yew, osage or black walnut?and they are as tall or taller than the archer. The strongest are powerful enough to shoot an arrow through a plate of armor at 365 meters (400 yds), though their more typical range is about half that. To shoot a longbow with accuracy requires great skill and strength. Easy to reload, the longbow was reputedly Robin Hood?s weapon as he roamed Sherwood Forest in the 1200?s, and it later dominated the battlefields of northern Europe from 1300 to 1500, credited among other things with assuring victory to the British against the French in 1346 at the Battle of Cr?cy and again in 1415 at Agincourt. The disadvantage of a longbow is that its size requires that the archer be on foot: It is almost impossible to shoot a longbow while riding a horse.

Composite bows are typically made of wood, horn and shredded animal sinew. They can pack the same power as a longbow but in a smaller, lighter form usable by a mounted archer.

Recurved composite bows are the most powerful, compact design known. The recurve refers to the tips that curve forward, in the direction of the shot. Each variation of the recurved composite design?Persian, Turkish, Indian or Mongol?excels in a particular area: The Persian bow, for example, trades distance for power; the Turkish bow sacrifices accuracy for distance. Some recurved composite bows use other materials: The Chinese bow, for example, is made with a bamboo core covered with strips of young bamboo on the back (in place of sinew) and dried, year-old bamboo on the belly.

Crossbows are mounted in a metal frame equipped with a crank, which gives the archer a mechanical advantage in drawing the bow. Though it shoots with great power and accuracy, its long "reloading time" made it more useful in sieges than in battles. Crossbows were developed and used in Europe in the 11th to 15th century, and Europeans also deployed them in the Middle East during the Crusades.

This article appeared on pages 2-11 of the September/October 2003 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

[Administration]

For every weapon, a defense; for every defense, another weapon...

Written by William A. Ward

In the spring of the year 1285 B.C. the royal army of Egypt marched northward into Syria to engage a powerful Hittite force in a battle that was to settle for several generations the long and bloody contest between the two empires for control of southern Syria.

The Egyptians, advancing on the city of Kadesh, some 16 miles southwest of modern Homs, had somehow permitted their four regiments to spread out so far along the line of march that when the lead regiment was making camp before the walls of Kadesh, the second regiment was still crossing the Orontes River seven miles away. The other two regiments were even further behind. Suddenly?as the Egyptians began to ford the river?the Hittites launched one of the great chariot attacks of ancient history. It demoralized the panic-stricken Egyptians and gave their enemies a swift, easy victory. For a few moments the power of mighty Egypt tottered perilously. But then the Hittites made a mistake. They paused to plunder the goods and weapons of the defeated army instead of pressing on. That gave the regiment at Kadesh time to march back to the river where, in company with some newly arrived allies, they saved the day.

In itself the Battle of Kadesh settled nothing. Neither side could claim a total victory. But the battle did result in a peace treaty that remained in effect for several generations and defined the boundaries of the Egyptian and Hittite spheres of influence in Syria and marks the establishment?probably for the first time in military history?of a balance of terror more than 3,000 years before anyone got around to coining a phrase to describe it. It also suggests an unsettling fact: that the survival of man and his empires has depended for a disturbingly long time on the efficiency of military strategy and the technology of weaponry.

In this modern age people suppose that with nuclear missiles man has achieved the ultimate in military weapons. But a careful examination of reliefs and paintings on the walls of ancient temples or of written documents of the past suggests that as early as the third millennium, men were certain that they had the ultimate weapon only to find that each time "the other side" was able to develop, first, a defense, and then a new weapon.

Military history actually begins with the Sumerians, a non-Semitic people who inhabited southern Iraq and who left the first detailed records of their armies. As early as the first part of the third millennium B.C. the Sumerians had forged strong city-states and could field armies of great power and versatility. As was true of most ancient armies, the backbone of the Sumerians was the infantry. The Sumerian infantry was divided into light infantry companies, lightly clad mobile troops who fought with clubs, javelins and daggers, and heavy infantry companies, whose troops wore bulky clothing?as armor?and copper helmets and fought with a heavy short spear. But the Sumerians had developed some surprises for their enemies, too. One was a method of attack: they marched into battle behind a solid row of shields?thus anticipating Alexander's Macedonian Phalanx, by more than 2,000 years. The other surprise was a war chariot, the first known in history.

The Sumerian chariot was not the horse-drawn chariot that was to become so important later?the horse had not yet made its appearance in the Middle East?but a heavy cumbersome vehicle drawn by a team of four asses. It had two or four solid wheels made of three slabs of wood held together by cross-tenons on either side of the axle, and for "tires" had strips of leather or copper nailed in place with copper studs. Although it could not have been capable of swift maneuvers, it carried, besides the driver, a warrior who fought with spear, javelin and axe, and must have been for its day a formidable weapon.

It was fortunate that the contemporary Egyptians never met the Sumerians in battle. For although Egypt had created a brilliant civilization in the early third millennium B.C., her military forces would have been no match for the Sumerian phalanxes and chariots. The Egyptian army of this period consisted entirely of light infantry which wore no armor and fought with short-handled axes, throw-sticks and?the only weapon that might have given the Sumerians pause?bows and arrows. But the two empires never did clash and if the Egyptian military standards seemed primitive by Sumerian standards, Egyptian troops still managed to defend Egypt and to embark on limited conquests in Nubia, Libya and Palestine.

With those exceptions, however, warfare changed little in the next 1,000 years. Then, during the first half of the second millennium B.C., there occurred a revolution in warfare in which the armies of the ancient Middle East developed such advanced weapons, tactics and defences that they were not substantially altered until the introduction of firearms in the late Middle Ages. And the beginning of the revolution was the appearance of the horse-drawn chariot.

The horse-drawn chariot was as different from the Sumerian chariot as a pistol is from a muzzle-loader. It had spoked wheels and a light wooden frame construction and was drawn by two swift horses. It could charge quickly, maneuver easily and provide a mobile base of firepower which could be moved swiftly from one point on the battle-field to another?rather like the helicopters of Vietnam. Chariots were rarely used in either direct frontal attacb on advancing infantry formations or on other chariots. They galloped around the flanks and rear, disrupting these formations from a distance with javelins and arrows. They attacked directly only when the enemy troops had become disorganized or when it was time to deliver a final crushing blow to an array already in retreat.

The horse-drawn chariot came from the North. In the early centuries of the second millennium B.C., Indo-Aryan peoples speaking strange dialects akin to those of India, moved into northern Iraq and Syria, and?with the chariot giving them an edge over the local people?established themselves as a ruling warrior-caste. The nations around them were quick to copy this marvelous new war-engine so that by the 16th century B.C. it was a component in all armies?with the result that military tactics had to be radically revised, sometimes' in a most amusing way. One Egyptian general, faced with a huge mass of enemy chariots, broke it up by turning a mare loose among the stallions. Instead of charging the Egyptians the stallions went galloping off the field in pursuit of the mare and Egypt won another battle.

Other developments of this period affected siege tactics. While chariotry was invaluable in open battle, armies were more often engaged in tedious and costly siege warfare in which heavily fortified cities had to be taken by storm. Up to the first half of the second millennium B.C., tactics for breaching fortifications were straightforward and simple: under cover of concentrated archery fire, warriors raised scaling ladders against the walls, climbed them and tried to overpower the defenders at the top. Such tactics are shown in Egyptian reliefs of the third millennium. But at the beginning of the second millennium the whole concept of siege warfare changed with the appearance of the battering ram.

This first battering ram was a long metal-tipped pole operated by three or four soldiers from inside a movable structure which offered an overhead shield from arrows and other missiles. Since walls were generally built of mud bricks, this was an effective means of poking a hole big enough to admit troops. Then, according to documents from eastern Syria, dating back to the 18th century B.C., there was still another development: siege-towers. These were movable towers from which archers, raised to the level of the city walls, could rake the defenders with arrows. In combination with scaling-ladders and battering-rams, siege-towers soon destroyed the advantage that defenders had always held over attackers.

Army engineers were not long, however, in developing answers to the siege-machines. Since the battering ram could breach the strongest walls, they developed a new type of fortification that made it virtually impossible for such machines to get near the walls in the first place. They sharpened the natural slopes of the mounds on which the fortifications stood, covered the slopes with packed earth and stone and coated them with plaster. At the bottom they dug a moat. The result was a smooth sloping surface surrounding the town, and ending in a deep ditch, sometimes filled with water. Since attacking forces first had to cross the moat, then move up a slippery plastered hill-side before they could reach the city walls, battering-rams and siege-towers were rendered almost useless.

For a time, these defenses restored the advantage of the defenders. Some commanders, in fact, did not bother to attack strong cities directly any more, preferring to try and starve them into submission. One Egyptian general turned to trickery to take the powerful town of Joppa. Promising favorable peace terms, he withdrew his attacking army from the walls and sent a long train of basket-laden donkies into the town. Since the train supposedly bore gifts and supplies, it was allowed to enter the gates. In an action reminiscent of the Trojan Horse and Ali Baba, armed troops sprang from the baskets and Joppa was quickly added to the Egyptian empire.

But if the new tactics reduced the value of siege-machines for the Egyptians, they only stimulated the armies of Mesopotamia to invent even more ingenious methods. When confronted by moats, for example, the Mesopotamians simply filled them with earth and rubble. Then they constructed ramps of wood or brick right up to the walls and pushed the siege-machines up the ramps into position. By the time the Assyrian Empire had arisen in the eighth century B.C., such techniques were so perfected that the Assyrians rarely failed to take a city.

From the 16th to the 12th centuries B.C., when the Egyptians of the Nile Valley, the Hittites of central Turkey and the Mitannians of northern Syria and Iraq struggled almost continually for possession of Syria, warfare changed significantly again. Under the stress of such unremitting demands armies had to organize more efficiently?nowhere more effectively than in Egypt.

Prior to the 16th century B.C., Egypt had no permanent standing army. Much as levies of peasant-soldiers were raised in medieval Europe, the earlier Egyptian kings relied on their district governors to provide companies of part-time troops when the need arose. But after the 16th century, a whole new concept was introduced?the permanent standing army made up of professional soldiers, led by seasoned and experienced officers. Many of these professionals received specialized training and were then formed into special units: marines who fought at sea, garrison troops to man border stations or fortresses in the provinces, or shock troops who led infantry charges. There were even companies that specialized in the use of a particular weapon, such as the throwing axe.

The rise of professional soldiers resulted in an organizational structure as complex as that of many modern armies. The main tactical combat unit was the infantry company of 250 men. This was subdivided into platoons of 50 with each platoon divided into squads of 10. Companies, in turn, formed regiments?some as large as 5,000 men?and several regiments formed an army. Attached to the infantry units were squadrons of chariots, the number depending on the circumstances of the moment, and contingents of mercenaries, drawn largely from the Nubian and Libyan provinces.

To administer, supply, train and lead a professional army of this kind also required a large corps of non-combatants?to keep records, arrange and transport enormous quantities of supplies and manufacture and repair weapons.

In this same period, weaponry and equipment were steadily developing too. The Hittites, for instance, had developed a much more effective chariot. Where the Egyptians assigned just two men?driver and warrior?to their chariot, the Hittites assigned three, the third being a shield-bearer who could also fight. With three men and a large chariot they could thus use it for frontal assaults.

Other weapons developed in the second millennium, included the sword, in its many varieties, of which the most popular was the sickle-sword. With a sickle-shaped blade that gave a long curved cutting and chopping edge, and a hilt and blade that was stronger than an axe, because it was cast in one piece, the sickle-sword became a standard hand weapon in every army.

One of the most decisive new hand-weapons was the composite bow, Made from several materials glued together?wood, animal horn, tendons and sinews?this new type of bow had a range of three to four hundred yards. Its impact on warfare was equal to that of the English longbow and the crossbow of medieval times.

Another innovation was scaled body armor. Although in earlier times, helmets and heavy clothing offered some protection, the extensive use of more powerful bows and swords made more adequate covering necessary. Chariot warriors were especially vulnerable since they were more exposed and could not easily carry shields?which is why body armor of bronze scales sewn on cloth is commonly associated with charioteers. The bulk of an army went without armor; indeed it would not have been practical. Ancient armor coats were quite heavy and a foot soldier would have found it more of a drawback than a help. Charioteers rode into battle, so the excessive weight of armor added little discomfort while providing protection. The infantry-man, whose life often depended on quick reactions, was usually better off without it.

In the first millennium B.C. these centuries of development came to a head along the Tigris River with the rise of the fierce, wholly militaristic Assyrian Empire whose soldiers, in Byron's words, "came down like the wolf on the fold," and swept through the Middle East in a swath of blood. The Assyrian armies of the eighth to the sixth centuries B.C. were probably the most efficient fighting force of ancient days. Rigorous training and yearly maneuvers, whether there was to be an actual campaign or not, kept these troops in constant fighting trim. And in the field, the Assyrians brought the integrated use of the various combat elements to a level never reached before. Cavalry units rode in support of the chariots and attacked the enemy flanks. Infantry regiments, now as liberally equipped with helmets and armor as their mounted comrades, attacked in concert: assault troops, archers (protected by shield bearers with shields taller than men) and slingers, who could hurl stones with stunning force. In addition, the Assyrians marshaled the war machines of earlier times into squadrons to demolish whole sections of a fortification at one time. The combined knowledge gained in centuries of testing and improvement were thus concentrated in one army that was for a time invincible?until Assyria's own vassal states, having learned well the methods of their mistress, turned and destroyed her.

Thus did ancient man wage war, and thus did he learn, as have all his descendants, that for every weapon there is a defense and for every defense another weapon. From the graves of countless unknown soldiers and the battered remains of ancient cities, we of the modern age can learn that there is nothing new in the basic art of warfare, only improvements.

William A. Ward teaches ancient history at the American University of Beirut, is an expert on Egyptology and the author of one book and several articles. This is his second article for Aramco World.

This article appeared on pages 30-33 of the May/June 1967 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

[Diving Doc]

That is an explanation worthy of applause. This man brings history to life. I have only one question; when did the compound bow come into play?

Great post and, an education.

Cheers,
Doc

[Administration]

A Browning Compound Bow
Compound bow
A compound bow is a modern bow that has pulleys or cams at the end of each limb through which the bow string passes. As the bow is pulled back (drawn) the pulleys or cams turn which, in turn, reduce the amount of force needed to completely draw the bow. They are little affected by changes of temperature and humidity and give superior accuracy, velocity, and distance in comparison to the traditional longbow. They were first developed and patented by Holless Wilbur Allen in the USA in the 1960s and have become increasingly popular.

Compound Bow Technique
A compound bow is designed to reduce the force that an archer must hold, and increase the overall energy stored by the bow. Most compound designs use cams on the ends of the limbs to optimise the leverage exerted by the archer and reduce the holding force of the bow at full draw while maintaining the force through the draw.

The archer usually uses a release aid to hold the string steadily and release it precisely. This attaches to the bowstring at a point and permits the archer to release the string with a pull of a trigger. With less force required to hold a compound bow at draw, the muscles take longer to fatigue, thus giving a compound archer more time to aim. For these reasons, the compound bow is sometimes derogatorily referred to as a "training-wheel bow." In general, good recurve technique usually makes good compound technique. A compound bow must be adjusted so that its draw length is correct for the archer. The draw length is determined largely by the archer's arm length and shoulder width.

[Solomon]

Longbows at the Battle of Cr?cy

English longbow
The English longbow, also called the Welsh longbow, was a powerful type of medieval longbow (a tall bow for archery) about 2.0 m (6 ft 6 in) long used by the English and Welsh, both for hunting and as a weapon of war. English use of longbows was effective against the French during the Hundred Years' War, most famously at the Battle of Agincourt (1415).


Origin of the English Longbow
Early 12th Century: The Longbow was developed from a Welsh bow that had been used against the English. During the numerous skirmishes with the Welsh, the English had witnessed the power of this weapon.

1252: Longbow was accepted as a formal military weapon.

C.1280: Longbow adopted by Edward I during the Welsh campaigns after seeing how effectively the Welsh used the bow.

1331-1333: Longbow used by Edward III during the Scottish Campaign.

1337-1453b: The hundred years war with France:During this time, the English and Welsh longbowmen were the most prominent part of the English army, sometimes outnumbering the Men-at-Arms by as much as 10:1. The average was a ratio of about 3:1.

1346: The Battle of Crecy: The English army of Edward III won the first major battle of the 100 Years War. The English numbered between 12,000 and 19,000 men, of which 7,000 to 10,000 were archers. The French Army, under Philip IV was made up of 12,000 mounted Men-at-Arms, 6,000 Genoese Crossbowmen, and up to 60,000 Foot Soldiers. The English were aided by a shower that morning, making a charge up a muddy hill, with the sun in their eyes and arrows raining down on them -- most difficult for the French. The opening shots were loosed by the Genoese Crossbowmen, which fell short. The English answered with five times as many arrows, which did not fall short. The Crossbowmen broke ranks and tried to flee the field. The French commander, however, was displeased with the apparent lack of courage and ordered that the Crossbowmen be ridden down by the Heavy Cavalry on their way to the English line. After 16 charges and 90 minutes, the French had lost 4000 knights, including 2 Kings, 2 Dukes, and 3 Counts. English losses were estimated at only 50 men.

1356: The Battle of Poiters: Edward III, The Black Prince of Wales, with 6,000-8,000 men defeated a French host 3 times as large. This time the French fought largely on foot, and this time, much hand to hand fighting took place, with the archers attacking the rear and flanks of the French charge. In the end, the results were much the same as at Crecy. Two thousand French Knights and Nobles, including the Constable of France, 2 Marshals, The Bearer of the Oriflamme, along with thousands of common foot soldiers were killed. One Arch-Bishop, 13 Counts, 5 Viscounts, and 21 Barons and Bannerets were killed or captured.

1415: The Battle of Agincourt: In what was perhaps the greatest victory of the Hundred Years War, a small, sick and exhausted English army under King Henry V, won an astounding victory over a seasoned French host at least three times as large. The composition of the English forces was 1,000 Men-at-Arms and 5,000 Archers divided into the traditional three "battles" with the archers in a wedge pattern flanking each "Battle". When the battle was over, between 7,000 and 10,000 French had been killed. Among those killed or captured were the Constable of France, a Marshal, 5 Dukes, 5 Counts, and 90 Barons. Fewer that 500 English had been lost during the fighting.


Battle of Agincourt
The Battle of Agincourt was fought on 25 October 1415, (Saint Crispin's Day), in northern France as part of the Hundred Years' War during a rainy day. The combatants were the English army of King Henry V and that of Charles VI of France. The latter was not commanded by the incapacitated king himself, but by the Constable Charles d'Albret and various notable French noblemen of the Armagnac party. The battle is notable for the use of the English longbow, which helped the English compensate for their inferior numbers. The battle was also immortalised (and somewhat fictionalised) by William Shakespeare as the centrepiece of his play Henry V.

Solomon

[Diving Doc]

Antiquity and the classical age, c. 1000 BC?AD 400 > Offensive weaponry > The bow > The composite recurved bow
The next major improvement, one that was to remain preeminent among missile weapons until well into the modern era, was the composite recurved bow. This development overcame the inherent limitations of wood in stiffness and tensile strength. The composite bow's resistance to bending was increased by reinforcing the rear, or belly, of the bow with horn; its speed and?


This is what I was talking about. Obviously this was a weapon of great importance and changed warfare, the very way battles were fought. I would know some more of this.

Doc

[Sovereign]

Hun bow
An Introduction to Ancient Combat
But without doubt the greatest weapon of the ancient world was the compound recurved bow used by the Steppe peoples of Central Asia. It is highly possible that more people died from this weapon in the hands of peoples like the Scythians, Huns, and later the Mongols than any other before the introduction of firearms. They were constructed from wood layered with sinew on the outer edge, or back, and horn on the concave surface known as the belly. When unstrung the bow was the exact opposite curve of when in use, with the arms pointing towards the target if held as in combat. By bending the arms back the bow curved back on itself, hence the term recurved. Already under considerable tension, when drawn the sinew on the back of the bow built up energy trying to pull the arms back to its natural shape. Simultaneously the horn on the belly was compressed, causing it to exert pressure in order to push the bow to its un-drawn state. Consequently when the arrow was released it was given an impressive launch from the violent snap of the bow back to its resting configuration. Size varied from the smaller 4-foot Scythian types to the 5-foot Hunnic types. The Hunnic weapon was unique in that it was asymmetrical, one arm being longer than the other. Draw weights were roughly around the 50-pound mark, allowing for quick, easy shooting on horseback.

Range was impressive; in extreme cases with a skilled archer on horseback the recurved composite bow was able to launch arrows over 200 yards. However at this range accuracy was non-existent, even against large numbers of massed infantry. More than likely the most common range in combat was as little as 10 feet to maximize accuracy and the penetrating power of the arrow itself. At this range the high speed tactics and light equipment of the steppe horse archers becomes quite practical. As archers they were unable to engage hand to hand against heavily armed opponents, forcing them to push their mounts to the breaking point in order to stay ahead of quick moving light infantry or enemy cavalry. To compensate for their lack of armor they were quick shots, added by the layout of their tack and method of shooting.

The quiver was hung either from the rider?s belt or the horse?s saddle, almost exclusively on the left side, allowing them to draw the replacement arrow with their right hand while holding the bow with the left. Before a charge, the archer would draw several arrows from the quiver, holding them in the bow hand, which they would during the attack. By using the right hand to pick a replacement shaft from the left hand, reload times were greatly reduced. The arrow was knocked from the right side, meaning that the arrow was rested against the bow rather than the archer?s hand as with most European bows. Another major difference between steppe archery and its western counterparts was the use of a thumbring to draw the bowstring. It was a small metal ring worn on the shooter?s right thumb with a small needle made of metal or bone, which was used to grab the bowstring. The very fact of wearing a thumbring was seen as a sign of manhood within steppe cultures. When compared to the three-finger draws practiced by the Mediterranean civilizations the thumbring was far faster, allowing for more arrows to be launched in a shorter time. In addition horse archers had a massive 270-degree radius of fire available to them while mounted, allowing for such maneuvers as firing directly behind them over the horse?s rump while running away from an enemy. This tactic was practiced by all steppe peoples but was known as the Parthian Shot, no doubt coined after continued bloody encounters with these renowned archers by the Hellenistic Successors and the Romans.

The Scythians, Parthians, Sarmatians, and Huns were all users of the recurved composite bow. Some such as the Scythians and Huns had large armies comprised of almost entirely horse archers, while the Parthians fielded large numbers of archers with supporting cataphracts. The Sarmatians were unique among steppe people in that the bow was not their primary weapon, preferring to come to grips with the enemy as cataphracts. Yet despite this many Sarmatian heavy horsemen carried bows in case the situation was not favorable to hand-to-hand combat and were backed up by light cavalry just like those of the other steppe nations. Common to all was the powerful respect granted to the weapon and an acknowledgement of its deadliness. Enemy armies were constantly bested when the steppe horsemen were allowed to fight a battle on their terms. The list of battles won by steppe warriors equipped with this weapon is a testament to its killing power. Battles such as Carrhae, the Persian invasion of Scythia, and Chalons were all bloody affairs thanks to the recurved bow.


A Scythian style bow from Subeshi in Shanshan County, Xinjiang
SCYTHIAN-STYLE BOWS DISCOVERED IN XINJIANG

[Diving Doc]

Thanks for that. I was sure there was a good story behind that historical weapon. I wonder how they came to the design as it was such a departure from the simple bow. I wonder if it had to do with the wood that was available, or rather unavailable. Pretty amazing how old the design of the compound bow is.

Doc

[Solomon]

The world is divided into two camps on this: supporters of the compound recurved bow and supporters of the longbow. Personally, I belong to the latter.

What the above history of the compound recurved bow hints at, but is not explicit on, is that it was small and light, able to be used by women and children (or at least very young lads). It was used most commonly, as the piece says, at extreme short range - some 10 feet. At long range, it had no accuracy at all and I doubt if the penetration would have been much better at distance.

In my view, if a horde of archers using that bow approached an English army using the longbow, it would have been annihilated at distance:
Skeletons of Bloodiest Day, Towton Hall, Yorkshire, Richard III's Chapel
It has been calculated that the Yorkists were firing some 120,000 arrows a minute into the Lancastrian ranks.

Solomon

[Diving Doc]

Solomon,

of course the Long Bow couldn't be used on horseback which may have been one of the reasons for the short bow. I was also thinking it might have had something to do with suitable material for building the bow in the area where these people lived.

I personally favor the Long Bow. I used one for hunting in my youth.

Cheers,
Doc

[Solomon]

Good point about the use of the bow on horseback, Doc. Of course, the armies that used the compound recurved bow tended to ride the steppes.

It is interesting to see what happened when the Scythians met with a European army, led by Alexander the Great.


ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND THE SCYTHIANS
The first effective use of conventional forces against guerrillas was Alexander the Great's Scythian campaign. As a military force, the Scythians were very much like terrorists. Here are some points of comparison:


    * They were nomads, with no fixed location or base.

    * They had no set organizational structure (hierarchy) that could be leveraged through a decapitation attack (as Alexander used against the Persians by attacking Darius).

    * Their force was self-contained and therefore didn't present any vulnerable lines of communication or material.

    * The Scythians were very mobile horse archers that could could attack from a distance, swarm on vulnerabilities when exposed, and flee to safety when engaged.


The totality of these strengths allowed the Scythians to defeat all conventional enemies sent against them. Alexander changed this. Here's how. Alexander recognized that the only way to defeat the enemy was to trap the enemy in a situation where their mobility was negated and they were forced to engage. There are two ways to do this. The first way is to trap the enemy on ground that prevented mobility. However, the Scythians were unlikely to fall into this trap.

The second solution was to create a situation where the enemy was trapped by the maneuver of forces in a way that restricted mobility. Alexander chose this solution. To do this, Alexander sent a small force of vulnerable calvary forward against the Scythians. The Scythians quickly began to swarm on this small force by riding around them in a circle and pelting them with arrows. While this "bait" was engaged, he moved forward light missile infantry as a screen to his maneuvers.

Behind the screen, he moved his remaining calvary in three columns (left wing, center, and right wing) to positions that would allow him to trap a segment of the encircling Scythians between the calvary "bait" and his main force. Once positioned, he charged forward, springing the trap. A large segment of the Scythians were thereby trapped, where they were either cut down or captured.

The result of this action quickly resulted in the capitulation of the Scythians. The reason was that their tactics had been defeated. Without an ability to attack with success, they were without recourse.

Arrian 4.4.6-7 and Macedonian combined-arms tactics against the Skythians
de Selincourt's translation (1958 Penguin, revised 1971):

"As soon as every man was across and the army massed on the river-bank, a regiment of mercenaries and four squadrons of lancers were ordered forward to lead the attack. The Scythians met the challenge: their numbers were for the moment superior; they made circles round the small attacking force, shooting as they rode, then galloped off to a safe distance. At this Alexander ordered an advance by a mixed force consisting of the cavalry together with the archers, the Agrianes, and other light troops under Balacrus, and, when they were almost within striking distance, gave the word for three regiments of the Companions and all the mounted javelin-men to charge, while he himself at the head of the remaining cavalry came on at the gallop with his squadrons in column. This effectually put a stop to the enemy's circling movements: the Macedonian cavalry, with the light troops mixed with it in close support, was now right on top of them, and it was no longer possible for them to repeat their former manoeuvre without the certainty of destruction."

[Diving Doc]

A very nice piece of strategy I must say. That was really well thought out, given their tactics  and weaponry.

Doc

[Tayopa]

Gentlemen:  As  a kiddie I was an archery enthusiast.  I won the usual no of contests and was very fortunate to have met Mr  Hill at one.   He apparently  liked me and on occasion, we had interesting talks.  He was a fantastic Archer, I believe that many of his feats have st ll not been broken.

Once we discussed the Turkish  recurve bow.    He stated flatly that he would never use one  since he wasn't good enough to master it well enough for accuracy.  This was from one of the worlds leading archers, one that for  over 5 yeas was never beaten in world competitions.

When I last met him, he was using a laminated bamboo bow of his own construction of over #100 draw.

My last bow was  Bear semirecurved  laminated bow of #65 .

Doc we should have gotten together.  I also tried hunting deer with a  spear, luckily I had a can of Pork & Beans, sigh, but I did harvest quite  bit  of  small game with a  5'  blow gun.

Tropical Tramp