Hammer-Purgstall's "On Bow and Arrow" contains some interesting passages concerning Neba wood (=Nab?) and other woods, used by arabs and persians for bow+arrow making. He states that Neba is probably yew.
-> enjoy:
Ssafra, the yellow, a bow made from the yellow wood of the neba tree
Schewat, the name of the tree that bows are cut from and which the same as Neba and Scherijan
An arrow of Kidh wood sounds different to an arrow of Neba wood, and is thus not of the same stuff
One of the most famous sayings involving arrows is that of the regret of Kosaji, which is given by Sylvestre de Sacy in his Chrestomathie Arabe. Koasji had cut himself a bow and five arrows from the beautiful yellow neba wood and, in the night, ambushed some gazelles. Five times pack of the latter came past and five times he shot one of his five arrows, every time seeing sparks come from the rocks. Thinking he had aimed wrongly, when he had no more arrows left he snapped his beautiful bow in anger. When day broke, he saw that five dead gazelles lay around and the bloody arrows lay some distance from these. The arrows had passed through the gazelles and still retained enough power to spark against the rocks. Out of remorse for having broken his beautiful bow, he bit off his thumbs, giving rise to the saying: ?more regretful than Kosaji?.
Pelenk, Pinus Orientalis Linei, a type of conifer tree found in Trabzon. These four types of wood are given in the Excerpts and are still used for arrow-making in Constantinople today. Amongst the Arabs, however, the most highly prized wood for arrow-making is the yellow Neba, which the Kamus says can be of three kinds. The first kind is that which grows on mountain tops and is called Neba, the second grows at the foot of mountains and is called Scherjan, and the third grows in pits and deep valleys and is called Schwewhath. The Kamus says that the tree is known in Turkish as Kam-agadschi, Kogusch-agadschi and akdsche-agadschi, and in Persian as Beschdschir. Of the three Turkish names, only kain appears in the Turkish dictionaries, and is said to mean beech and most definitely not Neba, whose yellow colour is so distinctive that it is mentioned in a saying: ?yellower than an arrow of Neba?. The word beschdschir is also missing from the Persian dictionaries. Schulten translates Neba, which is probably yew, in Semachscheri?s ?Collection of Wise Sayings? as ash, which is any case more plausible than beech, by reason both of the colour and the hardness of the wood
The Arabs are hard like the Neba
The Persians are like willows.
The famous Kassidet Makssuret of the great lexicographer Ibn Doreid also uses an arrow cut from Neba wood as an image of a pilgrim dried out and turned yellow by the hardships of the pilgrimage:
The long hunger had tapered his body
Like an arrow cut from Neba wood.
The famous elegy of the great poet of the Beni Hodeil, Ssachrolgaij, includes the words:
The yellow bow protects me which Sawa made me
Which makes a sound, like that of many men?
It makes its noise when it recoils
Like wild tribes calling through the desert.
I will follow these verses from poets of the Beni Hodeil, which concern themselves particularly with descriptions of bows and arrows, with the following section from a poem by Omer B. ed-Dachils, which gives an exhaustive description of bows and arrows:
It sounds like the moans of widows and orphans
who yearn for their husbands and fathers.
With long, thin iron, with a sharp tip,
from which fire shoots into the eye of the enemy.
The bow is yellow and cut from a branch of Neba,
lined as if with streets and streams.
They turned and I aimed at the entrails,
and the arrows whizzes through the air like the branch of a young willow.
The top of the arrow, the feathers, drank blood,
mixed with the flood of water and iron.
It was at Allda where I and comrades
enjoyed the delicacies of fresh meat and fat.
The wood Schirajet, mentioned above as a type of Neba, also appears in the
poems of Ebu Omaret, of the Beni Hodeil tribe, in their anthology:
With every thin arrow
that thunders down from the noisy bow.
In addition to the four above-named types of wood, Neba, Scherjan or Schirjanet, Schewhath and Neschem, the Beni Hodeil anthology and the Hamasa also teach us about fifth and sixth kinds of trees which are used to make bows, i.e. sixthly [sic] Sera or Serae; a work of the great poet Ssachr includes the verse:
As if a bow were cur from the Sera tree
And seventhly Hirm:
Of my bow of light Hirm wood.
In addition to these woods, the Arabic dictionaries the Kamus and Dschewheri give an eighth: the Nescheb tree, from whose hard wood bows are made. Another saying involving Neba wood relates to the qualities of the latter, which is not at all suited, unlike the wood of the Merch and Affar trees, to making fire by friction. One says of a person who is very resourceful and well-equipped: If he used the Neba to make fire, it would work. The Arabs use Merch as the steel and Affar as the stone when
making a fire; this makes clear two verses from the Koran which would otherwise make no sense:
He, who has made fire from green wood, for you to use in starting fires.
What do you think of fire that comes from green wood ?did you create the wood,
or who?
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