11-22-2009, 10:21 PM
Quote:A good paper was in Barry Molloy's book The Cuting Edge. The paper, called "The reconstruction of Scythian bows", goes into a great deal of detail as to what sources they used for their reconstructions of ancient bows including Scythian and Bashkir. They ended up testing three bows all with a draw length of around 60 cm. Results are all recorded in scatttergrams rather than tables so it is difficult to extract data, and they use meric units such as kiloponds or Newtons to measure draw-weight so it is difficult to compare with earlier tests. Unfortunately they only measure arrow velocity at a distance of 1m from the bow so it doesn't tell us much about the amount of energy that can be delivered to a target.
Here is one set of data extracted from one of their graphs.
Bow 1 Scythian 60cm draw length 205N draw weight
34g arrow averaged 38m/s (1m from bow)
36g arrow averaged 36m/s (1m from bow)
38g arrow averaged 35m/s (1m from bow)
Do you know which archaeological evidence they drew on in reconstructing these bows? And what sort of Scythian bows were they - those of the western Scythians or Saka? Or did they just use "Scythian" as a generic steppe term?
A few very well (and, in some cases, near-perfectly) preserved Scythian-era bows have been found within the last few decades in Central Asia, but they are not easy to find information on. There are, of course, the bows from Subeixi in Xinjiang, dated 5th-3rd c. BC, but then there are also the extremely well-preserved bows from Saryg-Bulun burial 5 in Tuva, dating to between the 6th and 5th c. BC, along with a few other more fragmentary finds from later burials also from Tuva, and Olon-Kurin-Gol 10 in the Mongolian Altai, dating to the 4th or 3rd c. BC. The latter especially is a very important find, since it is the first actual bow found in a Pazyryk-culture burial; I was very disappointed to see, however, that in its most recent publication (Molodin et al., "Das skythenzeitliche Kriegergrab aus Olon-Kurin-Gol: Neue Entdeckungen in der Permafrostzone des mongolischen Altaj," in Eurasia Antiqua 14 (2008): 235-259) almost no attention and no new photographs were devoted to the bow. Closer study in the lab will hopefully allow this find to shed some light on the bows in use at the time.
Ruben
He had with him the selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he\'d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. Common enough for a man to name his gun. His is the first and only ever I seen with an inscription from the classics. - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
He had with him the selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he\'d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. Common enough for a man to name his gun. His is the first and only ever I seen with an inscription from the classics. - Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
