Parthian horse archers

[Alexandr K]

Hi Ruben,

Thank you very much for the information about Old Nisa! Would it be possible to point me to the relevant literature about the arrow heads? I have found some bibliography and literature about excavations in Old Nisa, but from the names of the publications it isn't very clear which of them could contain reports about the arrows. It would be quite difficult to obtain and read through all of them.

Unfortunately, this question is nearly impossible to answer based on archaeological evidence. The problem is that within graves of cultures where archery is widely practiced and weapons are buried with the interred the amount of arrows left in a burial often has little correspondence to the amount of arrows a warrior could have carried in everyday life. Oftentimes only one or a handful of arrows are provided on the basis of pars pro toto. However, I am not intimately familiar with excavations of Parthian burials which included weapons. I think when large quantities of arrows are included in burials such as those of steppe nomads, they rarely amount to more than 40 or 50, so this may be taken cautiously as an upper limit. 30-40 is probably a reasonable estimate.

Yes, I know it's almost impossible to get plausible information about this from archaeological evidence. Therefore I'm trying to find any clues that might help even a little bit in deciding this. Hopefully some passages in written sources (perhaps analogies with other ancient nations - Scythians, Greeks, Romans - I must check Coulston's article about Roman archery - ...?). So far I haven't been very successfull (the only things I have found are the mentions in Al-Tabari and Strategicon, but this is more than 600 years far away). I agree that 30-40 arrows is quite reasonable, but it would be good to have some more data to support this guess a little bit.

Thanks again. I appreciate your help.

Greetings
Alexandr