Bone and Horn Working

Bone and horn are the materials of the steppe bow. The composite bow has a belly of horn, and bone plates stiffen its ears and its grip.^[1] The same materials were made into arrow points and into fittings of the horse’s gear.^[2]

Bone plates of the bow

The bow of the Huns was a reflexed composite bow of 140 to 160 centimetres.^[1] Its wooden core was backed with sinew and bellied with horn.^[1] Seven bone plaques stiffened it, a pair on each ear and three on the grip.^[1] The long ears of such bows needed the plaques. Ears of plain wood broke under the strain of the draw.^[3]

The plaques are the main trace that survives, because horn, sinew and wood decay. In graves the sets are nearly always incomplete. The plaques from a grave at Blučina in Moravia do not fit one bow. They come from two or three broken bows.^[4] In a grave of the late fourth century at Ak-Tobe in the Tashkent oasis the two long bone strips came from two different bows. The dead warrior had been buried with a bow assembled from broken parts.^[5] A broken bow could not be repaired, and the owners seem to have been reluctant to bury a whole one.^[4]

Bone plates also lie in the graves of the Altai. The graves of the Bulan-Koby type, which existed from the end of the first millennium BC to the early sixth century, held bows, bone and iron arrowheads and plates of armour.^[6] A burial at Stepushka-2 of this type held bone plates for a bow, with bone arrowheads and iron ones.^[7] In the later graves of the Kudyrge type, which belong to the Türkic period, the bow changed. It became smaller, and it carried fewer bone plates.^[8]

The bowyers

A composite war bow of the quality of the Hunnic bow could only be made by professional bowyers, and they needed workshops.^[9] The work took long. Accounts of later composite bows give the time. The actual work took about eight days, and months were needed to adjust the bow. A fine Turkish bow of recent centuries took five to ten years, including the intervals for drying and seasoning.^[10] In 1929 old men in western Tuva told a researcher that in their youth, in the 1870s and 1880s, only two men in each of their districts could make bows.^[11] The view that each Hunnic archer made his own bow is therefore rejected.^[11]

The Germanic peoples that lived beside the Huns did not take the craft over. The graves of the Gepids hold swords, daggers, armour and arrow points, but not one bone strip.^[5]

The Chinese histories name the horn bow among the arms of the steppe. The Sui Shu lists the horn bow, the whistling arrow, armour, lance, sabre and sword as the arms of the Göktürks.^[12] The Hou Han Shu tells that in the country of the Xianbei a horned ox lives whose horns are made into bows, called horn-tip bows.^[13] No source describes how the horn was shaped, glued or seasoned.

Arrowheads of bone

Ammianus Marcellinus writes that the Huns fought from a distance with missiles that had sharp bone points instead of the usual ones, joined to the shafts with wonderful skill.^[14] Modern accounts hold that he may not have been entirely wrong, but that the tanged Hunnic arrowheads known from finds are all of iron.^[15] The fortified settlement of Ivolga, which is attributed to the Xiongnu, yielded split bone arrow points together with bow fragments.^[16] Bone carving is one of the crafts that the excavator of Ivolga names for that settlement.^[17]

Bone on the horse

A grave at Stepushka-2 in the Altai held bone fittings of the horse: a girth buckle, a cheekpiece (psalium) and a clamp for the hobble. It held a bone cosmetic brush as well.^[18] The grave belongs to the Bulan-Koby type.^[18] The same grave held an iron bit, so the Altai graves of the centuries before the Göktürk khaganate show horse gear of bone beside gear of iron.^[18]

Horn and antler in the goods of the Turkic lands

The Hudud al-ʿĀlam of the tenth century lists horn among the goods of the Turkic lands. The Toghuzghuz country, it says, exports musk, furs and horns called khutu.^[19] On the road in the same country the text names a mountain stage where many harts live, and from this mountain harts’ antlers are brought in great numbers.^[20] The Khirkhiz, that is the Kirghiz, send out musk, furs, two kinds of wood and knife handles made of khutu.^[21] The text gives the same khutu horns for the goods of China, and they too are made into knife handles.^[22] It does not say what animal the khutu horn came from or where the handles were cut.

Open points

No source describes a workshop for bone or horn among the Göktürks, the Uyghurs or the Xiongnu. The objects and the lists of goods show that the work was done. They do not show who did it, or whether the bowyers were herdsmen or attached craftsmen.

References

^ a b c d Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 222
^ Konstantinov 2018, p. 12
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 224–225
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 226–227
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 227
^ Konstantinov 2018, p. 11–12
^ Konstantinov 2018, fig. 5.2
^ Konstantinov 2018, p. 13
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 225
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 225–226
^ a b Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 226
^ Sui Shu (Book of Sui), juan 84
^ Hou Han Shu, juan 90
^ Ammianus Marcellinus; Rolfe 1939, p. 31.2.9, p. 385
^ Maenchen-Helfen 1973, p. 13
^ Wright 2009, p. 375
^ Houle 2011, p. 138
^ a b c Konstantinov 2018, fig. 5.1
^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 94
^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 95
^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 96
^ Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam; Minorsky 1970, p. 82

Sources

Literature

Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (1973)
John C. Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, with an English Translation, vol. III: Books XXVII–XXXI (1939)
Nikita Konstantinov; Vasilii Soenov; Synaru Trifanova; Svetlana Svyatko, History and culture of the early Türkic period. A review of archaeological monuments in the Russian Altai from the 4th–6th century AD (2018)
Joshua Wright; William Honeychurch; Chunag Amartuvshin, The Xiongnu Settlements of Egiin Gol, Mongolia (2009)
Jean-Luc Houle; Lee G. Broderick, Settlement Patterns and Domestic Economy of the Xiongnu in Khanui Valley, Mongolia (2011)
V. Minorsky, Ḥudūd al-ʿĀlam, "The Regions of the World": A Persian Geography 372 A.H. – 982 A.D., translated and explained, with the preface by V. V. Barthold, 2nd ed. (1970)