Composite bow

The composite bow is built in layers: a wooden core, horn glued on the belly, sinew on the back. Horn resists compression and sinew resists stretching. Therefore the bow stores far more energy for its length than a self bow does, and a short one can be drawn from the saddle.

That last point is the whole of its importance for the steppe empires. Mounted archery is what a steppe army is, and it is not possible with a long bow. Every confederation from the Xiongnu to the Göktürks fought with a weapon of this construction. It took a long apprenticeship to use and a year or more to build. This is one reason settled armies could buy horses but not easily copy the cavalry.

The bow of the Huns of the fifth century belongs to this family. It was 140 to 160 centimetres long and uneven in the length of its limbs. Glued plates of bone stiffened its ends and its middle grip.^[1] Some scholars add that the Hunnic bows of Carnuntum, Mainz and Simmering, and the bows found on the Volga, were not the bows of the Scythians and Alans.^[2] In the graves only the plates survive, with the notches for the string.^[1] One survey finds the bone-plated bow already in the first millennium BC and makes its origin among the hunters of the taiga round Lake Baikal probable. In the first century AD it lies in graves of Mongolia and Transbaikalia that are commonly assigned to the Xiongnu, at Noin Ula and Ilmovaja Pad. It also lies in a fortified settlement at Nižne-Ivolginsk. It is found in the Tian Shan, and in a grave of the fourth century at Pyongyang in Korea.^[1] In the west the Parthians used it, and Roman auxiliary archers took it over from them. The oldest dated find is from the Augustan camp at Oberaden in Westphalia.^[3] Its arrows had three-edged iron heads. In the steppe from Lake Baikal to the Volga, these had replaced bronze and bone from about the birth of Christ.^[4]

No Germanic people took it up. Not one Merovingian grave of the late fifth or the sixth century holds the bone plates of a reflex bow. Roman archers had carried the bow on the German frontier for centuries, and the Huns brought it again.^[3] Some scholars find the reason in the making of the bow, which the Germans could not learn from the eastern bowmakers. They add that the riders’ way of fighting was hardly imitated either.^[5] The Avars brought the bone-plated bow to central Europe in 568. Only after that are there a few cases among Lombards, Alamanni and Franks, and it did not displace the simple wooden bow that the Germans used.^[3]

The story of Marcian’s dream, in which a god showed him Attila’s bow broken, is taken as proof that contemporaries felt the bow to be the expression and symbol of Hunnic power.^[6] The death of Attila contains the story. Four princely graves of the age hold a bow cut from thin gold sheet round a core of at most a millimetre. They are at Jakuszowice near Kraków, Pécs-Üszög, Novogrigorjevka and Borovoje. The bow could not be shot and was made for the burial.^[7]

Bow and arrow also served as signs. The Jiu Tang Shu says that each of the ten shad of the western Göktürks was given an arrow, and that the people were therefore called the Ten Arrows.^[8] Some scholars take the arrow as a summons to a campaign or an assembly, and so as the token of a chief’s subordination. In that case the bow stood for the lord and the arrow for his subject.^[9] Some scholars count the bow among the insignia of a khan of the steppe.^[10]

In the Kutadgu Bilig of 1069–1070 the bow, ya, stands beside the arrow, ok, and the sword among the arms a warrior needs. There the commander of the army has his archers fight on foot.^[11]

References

^ a b c Werner 1956, p. 47
^ Ögel 1984, p. 103–105
^ a b c Werner 1956, p. 47–48
^ Werner 1956, p. 49
^ Werner 1956, p. 48
^ Werner 1956, p. 46–47
^ Werner 1956, p. 49–50
^ Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194
^ Turan 1945, p. 306–308
^ Kafesoğlu 1997, p. 268–269
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplets 2055, 2370

Sources

Kutadgu Bilig
Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang), juan 194

Literature

Joachim Werner, Beiträge zur Archäologie des Attila-Reiches (1956)
Bahaeddin Ögel, İslâmiyetten Önce Türk Kültür Tarihi. Orta Asya Kaynak ve Buluntularına Göre (1984)
Osman Turan, Eski Türklerde okun hukuki bir sembol olarak kullanılması (1945)
İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk Millî Kültürü (1997)
Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)