Question about the Archaemenid Persian draw and thum-draw.

This is where we discuss techniques used in Asian archery.
istanbuli
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Post by istanbuli » Wed Jul 18, 2007 11:59 pm

Dear Bede, being an artist myself :) I want to defend whoever made this mosaic and say a couple of words about the reliability of the old pictures.

How can we be so sure that the artist should never have seen a female archer?
Do we see any ?female archers? nowadays anywhere then?

The ottoman miniatures are still considered among the most reliable sources of the time they were painted in. They are strange pictures as they do not really match the drawing rules that we were taught at schools. Unusual colors, weird proportions, with the objects spread out of perspective orders etc. But they mean a lot with enough detail that were painted as close to the truth as possible.

It is true that people are well misled by the paintings of the old days but not generally because of the mistakes made in the paintings. Some experts are so romantic in reading what was depicted on a piece of art that they are totally misunderstanding and so misleading the others.

I do not want to carry on this discussion here any more but I still want to point out that the people in the past may well have been more realistic than we think they were. Please keep reading the lines below.

Even the scientists may fail in commenting on what they have found in the excavations. I have an example of this strange fact. It is again about an antique drawing on a wall that was explored years ago in T?rkiye and has been commented on by many scientists from all over the world since then. There are many articles of hundreds of pages written and published about it now. The general conceptions of all these researchers about that particular painting was it?s being a DEER which was painted there as part of a pagan religion. Its legs, body, head, and antlers everything was there. Although the picture was not that promising to be a deer who would dare to say a word against a well-known archaeologist?

The truth was discovered recently by a friend of mine who is far far away from the subject. With a fresh eye he could see an antique volcano explosion in the mentioned painting and that was an even bigger explosion though. He wrote an article about it adding many other supporting materials and proved that it had nothing to do with an animal figure or a pagan belief at all, but rather that was an important document of a gigantic explosion in today?s Hasan Dagi (Hassan Mountain) thousands years ago that might have affected everybody in the area.

So weren't the experts more pagans than the man who had painted it there  :)

In one of the very famous miniatures that show the gesture of an archer there is another big misunderstanding too which I will explain later. That may be the next scandal who knows? :)

e
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Bede
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Post by Bede » Thu Jul 19, 2007 10:46 pm

I am not attempting to denigrate the artist of the mosaic or artists in general. I agree with you that there are many important observations in works of art that show an object or an action that has been forgotten or lost.

I think you are right to want to put a limit on this discussion. This is an archery forum and not an art criticism forum. We sometimes get a little carried away. Your example is a very good demonstration of how people often only see what they expect to see.
Bede
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