Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[Sean Manning]

I liked that experiment in "The Cutting Edge" too. They used several bows, types of arrow, and shields and described their methods clearly. The book is poorly edited though- there are typos, sources missing from the bibliography, mis-captioned and missing photos, and so on. And the lack of tables of data is a nuisance.

My only serious disagreement with the experiment was their short draw of 60-65 cm. Apparently some Greek art shows short draws, but the Munich wood, an Achaemenid seal carving published in The Ancient World at War p. 69, and one of the seal impressions at Persepolis all show long draws with Scythian bows (by long I mean that the right hand is pulled back past the ear). Perhaps short arrows were used on the steppes, if most of the finds are short. I'm not familiar with the archaeological evidence for short arrows, but I don't know much about steppe archaeology. If anyone can give me references I'll add them to my reading list.

Blyth's estimates for an 'average' arrow look plausible when compared to some of the other sources I have. I'm just saying that unusually strong or skilled archers would have used stronger bows, and that archers would use different types of arrows in different situations. I'm sure there were archers using Scythian bows with 60 and 70 lb draws and heavy arrows, but they probably weren't typical.