Strength and Penetration of Scythian Bows

[Dave]

Jack, when and where was this paper published?

Dave in oz

[Romain]

I found one etruscan drawing depicting a bow on Google :

Etruscan painted terra-cotta slab: Iphigenia carried to altar (?). (7th-6th B.C.; Louvre).

Posting this, I'm using up the remains of my prcious posting quota...

[jack farrell]

Dave; There are about 39 known examples of Egyptian composite bows. 29 of these were in the King Tutankhamun burial, making it the mother lode of all composite bow burials. It is documented by Oxford U. Press., W. McLeod. The Brooklyn bow by McLeod; The Oxford bow by Balfour, and Hickman, The Berlin bow by Longman. Four Met bows by McLeod. Another Ciaro bow by Lucas-Harris. A Ciaro bow by McLeod. Another Cairo bow by Robinson.

Look for the COMPOSITE BOWS FROM THE TOMB OF TUTANKHAMUN, by McLeod, 1970. about 60pp. You'll be buisy for some time. -j-

[Adam Karpowicz]

Jack:

I need the length, thickness and width, preferably measured in several places along the limbs. The thicknesses of the component materials would be useful too.

I realize it may be impossible working from a photograph. Hopefully one width/thickness measurement would be given with it.

Adam

[redhawk]

Romain,thank you for the picture.
This bow looks very similar to the scythian bows.It looks again like a double-curved bow,the deflex seems to be not the sharp,the recurve is softer and not so long.
The arrows seem to be as long as the bow?

Jack,this evening I?ll post "my making" of the wooden core of the scythian bows.

[Andrew Hall]

There is a brief description and some simple drawings of some of the Subeixi bows in "New Achievements in Archaeological Research in Xinjiang during the Time Span (Continuation) 1990-1996", Xinjiang Institude of Archaeology and the Museum of the Xinjiang Autonomus Region, 1997, ISBN 7-80547-550-4 (Chinese text).

From my rough translations they are definitely horn/sinew bows, but the construction may differ from the later bows. There is a tiny cross-section drawing shown by the grip of one of the bows that has a 'T' shape inside the triangular cross-section. The description mentions the horn being glued to two pieces of tough wood. I would assume that the top of the 'T' is the layer of sinew, the upright is the horn, and the two triangular pieces filling in each side are the wooden pieces. An angular composite found at Thebes has a similar construction, though with a more rounded cross-section.

I will e-mail the drawings and text to Stephen to see if a coherent translation agrees with my assumptions.

Regards

Andrew Hall

[redhawk]

hi Jack,

when I was planning the reconstruction 3 possibilities came in my mind and I discussed them with Mr.Godehardt and then we made our decision to make it with a wooden core running through the whole length of the bow from tip to tip.I made the core like a usual selfbow of mulberry,I still have done 2 another scythian bows with caucasian yew and osage as a core.The shape was done by steambending at first the grip with its heavy reflex/deflex and then the recurves.I used jigs for a correct symmetric bending.

The second way to do it is the "glue-shaping" with 2 laths as you have done it with your egyptian composit.
The third way coming in my mind is to do it with a heavy reflex allover the whole length of the bow,as Adam has assumed.But in the Sycthian times there were no highly reflexed bows.Anyway Adam has "provocated" me to do it this way for my own private research.I?ve started it only made out of horn,sinew and bone.My favourite bows are hornbows with a bending section made of horn and sinew,without a wooden core.
It is also possible to do the "without wooden core-version" with less reflex,but then you need a thick hornstrip and the bow will be very heavy and "suck" the energy.

Very interesting is the actual posting of Andrew Hall.But at the moment I have to think about the sense of this kind of construction

[Stephen Selby]

Andrew Hall from the UK has just emailed me a short paragraph from a book in Chinese called "New Achievements in Archaeological Research in Xinjiang between 1990-1996", Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology and the Museum of the Xinjiang Autonomus Region, 1997, ISBN 7-80547-550-4.

I have translated the Chinese text giving details of two Subexi bows:

Bows, arrows, gorytoi.

Four sets were excavated in all, generally similar in form. The bows were sinuous in shape and had all [been] snapped at the grip and the string cut in two with a sharp blade. The items were placed together within their gorytoi. Between two and six wooden-shafted arrows were placed respectively in each gorytos.

Specimen from burial M4:8

One composite [bow]. The body of the bow is divided into inner and outer layers. The inner layer is horn in the form of a thick strip, sandwiched between two layers of flexible wood. The assembly is glued together. The outer layer is wound around with ox sinew. There is a turtle-head shaped string nock at each extremity. The string is made from thick ox sinew 0.4cm in diameter.

The middle of the bow is triangular and the ends of the limbs are oval for an average of one third of the length of the limb, which is 121cm long in total.

There are two wooden arrows similar in form, The shafts are circular [in section] and they are triple fletched. The points are made of wood, one having a triangular section with blade edges and one having just one edge. The points are made separately from the shafts and then glued together and bound with thread around the outside. The total length is 80cm.

One gorytos made of leather, reinforced with wood along the edges. There is a main compartment for the bow and sub-compartments to take the arrows. At the top are two leather straps, the main one of which would go over the shoulder and the lesser one could be tied around the waist and fixed with an iron hook. The centre portion is 30cm wide and the opening at the top 20cm wide, length 94cm. (Ill. 17,10)

Specimen from burial M27:11

One bow, six arrows and one gorytos. Bow?s length is 112cm, length of arrows 81cm, other details as Specimen M4:8 above. (Ill. 17,9)

The implication of this is that sinew was employed on the limbs as a binding material rather than to lend tensile strength. But I would caution against accepting the archaeologist's analysis without further observation. I should also like to see independent confirmation of the structure of the limb as 'thick horn sandwiched between two layers of flexible wood.'

[Adam Karpowicz]

The (obviously deliberate) breakage at the grip and the cut strings seem to indicate the bows could be real bows, not grave goods.

A very interesting construction. There has to be a practical reason for laminating the materials vertically. perhaps the horn strips were taken from the sides of horns, because horns in use did not allow to cut flat strips of sufficient thickness. Perhaps the horns were more round, cut in half vertically, and both halfs flattened with heat, allowing to cut several flat, vertical strips.

The length of 121 and 112cm must have been measured in a straight line.
Archeologists are notoriously loose in the choice of words. How do they know the sinew was taken from an ox? Now this statement will confuse researchers for generations.

Adam

[redhawk]

ehi,

Adam,your ideas on the hornstrips make absolutely sense.

The oxen-thing could be right.The oxen was known in the old chinese agriculture(I "googled" upon it),maybe they took their sinew cause it was easy to get.I?ve never used cattle neither oxen-sinew,and I can?t believe in their elasticity.

[jack farrell]

Adam and all; I posted the working drawings of the Egyptian Angular under that post. -j-

[Bede]

For Adam:
There is one Egyptian bow with several vertical laminations rather that the three in this one. Since the Tutankhamum bows exhibited so many different cross sections it looks like people were still actively experimenting with lamination designs.

The other area where vertical laminations were used in composite bows was in European crossbows. There the belly was wood and the core was vertical laminations surrounded by thick sinew. These bows were never as stressed as a normal hand bow of composite design.

Some things that are worth considering are that

• The cross-sectional composition at the centre of the bow may not be the same as the limbs. This is strongly indicated by the profile changes in the cross sections of the Xinjiang bows.
  The bow may have been broken ritually and that might have been considered necessary because of its magical significance rather than whether or not it was a real bow.
  The proportion of the width of the belly taken up by the horn strip may have increased in the flatter sections of the limbs.
  The bows may have been constructed by people from a differnet bow making tradition just as funeral objects made to look like the originals. This I think is unlikely.

I know most of this is obvious, but this discussion is getting very long and we might be losing sight of what we are talking about.

[Stephen Selby]

A very interesting construction. There has to be a practical reason for laminating the materials vertically. perhaps the horn strips were taken from the sides of horns, because horns in use did not allow to cut flat strips of sufficient thickness. Perhaps the horns were more round, cut in half vertically, and both halfs flattened with heat, allowing to cut several flat, vertical strips.

Adam, wouldn't you be worried about making assumptions based on the structure of the (supposed) grip? From what I've seen of hornbows, the grip does not usually reflect the construction of the working sections of the limbs. Could the grip have been built like the cross-section above but the lamination changed to lateral on the working section?

[redhawk]

hi you all,

the construction reminds me a russian bow I had to do right now.This bow is a composit made of birch and juniper and sinew-backing.As a reinforcement of its recurves a piece of bone was vertically inlayed and the sides of the grip were also reinforced with bone-plates.The working sections of its limbs were done without any vertical inlays.
I will glue hornstrips and a strip of mulberry in the dimensions of the subeixi-bow(working-section) and try to bent it,cause I?m really in doubt that it will bent enough.

[Adam Karpowicz]

Stephen:

Since as stated in the article, the two thirds of the bow have the triangular section (together with the grip, this is how I understand it), I would assume the construction to be as drawn by Andrew for this length. 2/3rd is quite a bit, so this would be the cross-section of the working limb, or most of it.

In response to Bede, my feeling is the flattened outer 1/3 of limbs have no horn at all. This would explain the cross-section of the limbs. And the all-wood 1/3 would add stiffness to the tips for less stack. The tips could be either spliced-in or continue all through the bow as a flat strip under sinew.

If I remember correctly, the Egyptian construction indeed consisted of vertical strips of wood for the core, but the horn strip was inlayed into the belly as a flat strip. I can be wrong.

Adam