Silk Road Museum Hun Bow project

Commenting on the pointed tips of the siyahs, check carefully whether there were horn or bone inserts. The 2-3 Century AD Xiongnu bows mostly had tip inserts to reinforce the string nock, which are often detached or not clear. Indeed, many such bows seem to have been deliberately broken at the time of burial.

For those who are interested in Xiongnu burials, there was a practice of two-stage burial. In the first stage, the body and burial goods were interred with only a light covering of stone and allowed to decompose for a period (probably one to two years as cold/dry conditions slowed down decomposition.) Then the body was uncovered and the upper torso was smashed before being re-covered with (for males) a horse sacrificed and placed above the corpse before completion of the burial with a stone mound.

Therefore there was great likelihood of damage or disturbance to bows and arrows used as burial goods.

Of course, the burial practices of the Huns, at a later time and different place, might have been completely different.

Stephen, that are very special burial traditions...

The siyahs of the bows from the Silk Road Museum are composed of three slats which is clearly seen in the photograph. The two outer slats have a different, grayish colour, and thus I think it?s bone or antler.

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JJ

Were the bows broken at burial to make sure robbers wouldn't steal bows from the graves?

Justin,
The most usual explanation is that the people burying them did not want to be harassed by well armed ghosts. In certain nomad burials, elements of equipment were reversed so that they could be used in the next world which was believed to be the reverse of this one. Breaking items was usually to ritually disable their dangerous qualities.

Xiongnu burials differed between the Northern and Southern confederations. This may have reflected different populations. Sometimes these nomadic confederations had very diverse populations.

Justin Ma wrote:

Were the bows broken at burial to make sure robbers wouldn't steal bows from the graves?

I don't think we'll ever quite know the reasoning behind burial customs. I doubt if people seriously feared that bows would be dug up and re-used. We could relate this to rites of passage in different cultures where certain totemic possessions of a person are considered to change state from 'whole' to 'broken' along with the owner upon death.

The desire to desecrate the torso is puzzling. As Bede suggests, it might be done to prevent haunting; but then why not just cremate him? The Xiongnu could have absorbed some Han Chinese beliefs about separation of the soul into hun and po (魂魄). The 'logic' then followed would be allow the hun to return to heaven within a year, then destroying the po to prevent haunting. But here I'm just fantasizing. Unlike the Chinese tradition, there's no literary source to fill in the blanks.

just to throw in this citation highlighting the importance of archery for the central asian nomads (letter from Mao'tun to the Han Emperor):
"... then he defeated L?-lan, Wusun and Ho-k?ut with 25 nearby states, those are now all made to Xiongnu, and the people who draw bows are united in one family."

(from the german wikipedia, does anyone know the extact source information)

Probably from the Han Shu (汉书) (Official Record of the Han). There is also a section of the Record of the Grand Historian on the Annals of the Xiongnu (史记《匈奴列传》); but I don't think it's from that.

I'm a bit concerned about the handle, generally straight in Hunnic examples, this looks quite Turkish by comparison. Will you find a way to remove excess here?

The Tibetans break the backbone of a body before the body is returned to nature with the belief that the soul cannot reenter the body and use it again.I am guessing the huns had a similar belief and crushed the upper torso for the same reason.

Orda,

when using a glued on handle piece on the front of the limb it is not possible to have a totally straight lined grip. I noticed this after the composition of the core... All in all it can?t be a true reconstruction without the precise measurements and important construction details unclear.

I straightened the handle front when reducing its thickness (after the photographs were taken), but it is nessecary to round the fades of the quite thick handle area because otherwise the joint could open when the bow is drawn. I believe now that the handle piece was originally glued on the belly side of the limb to achieve the original grip appearance of the hun bows. Maybe there existed different versions of it anyway. These bows existed over 1000 years and in a vaste region of Eurasia...

JJ

PjSingh wrote:

The Tibetans break the backbone of a body before the body is returned to nature with the belief that the soul cannot reenter the body and use it again.I am guessing the huns had a similar belief and crushed the upper torso for the same reason.

Interesting. If we followed that analogy, maybe the Xiongnu believed that bows had souls. I wonder if you know of any rituals intended to bring a soul or spirit into a newly-made bow?

Am thinking that this place where the bows were found, Miran, is not a place of the Hunns. Andrew uses the term Hunn-derived bow.

Jurgen; What I see in your Jan 4th photo is that there is horn which comes to both bow tips as part of the core.

The back bow shows two pieces, which are a different color to eachother. The front bow shows four pieces, a front layer which is insect eaten, a middle layer of wood which has a belly slat of a different material-probably horn. The join is just visible below the upper slat. And then there is a third layer just peeking out below the others; my inspection showed that this was also wood. To me, there is a fourth layer not seen or missing on this bow which is also horn.

Therefore the front bow would have two wood core slats with horn on the belly side. It was then covered by two side plates of horn. The grain in the side slats and the fact that it is insect eaten demonstrates that it is, in fact, horn and not bone or antler. That we have seen much evidence for bone side plates in archaeological contexts is not negated by these two bows which are mostly in a complete state. Left in a moist environment, these bows would have completely disappeared, leaving no archaeological evidence that they ever existed.

I only add that the bend of the front bow on the right side demonstrates that a V-splice was not used in the Miran bows and what you are constructing is a Turkic period type of bow anachronistic to bows of the period. I estimate that the original is more on the order of 160 cm but neither bow has its complete length.

I agree when you state that the complete construction is not now known.

Jack, it is clear that both Miran bows have the horn extending until the very tip of the siyah. Unfortunately I didn?t have such long horns... The belly slats hof both bows have pretty much the same colour and appearance. Interesting ist when you look further down the siyah of the first (upper) bow. There a much darker colour becomes visible and this should be the real colour of the horn, while more to the top it turns into a bright grey. Maybe this is something sticking to the horn, possibly glue.

I don?t agree with you on the material of the side plates. The siyah side material has a whitish colour and in my eyes does not resemble wood at all. The wooden parts are brown. I think it must be antler or horn. When most (or all) of the archaeological sideplates are bone or antler, it is highly probable that they are in this case made from the same material. If it was proven that bone/ antler were suited well for that task, people would use this rather than another material.

What you think of as insect damage can also be caused by small rodents or have a totally different cause...

The bows are not as long as you think, acccording to a scaled sketch a friend made when the bows were outside of the display case the smaller one was between 130 to 140 cm long (with reconstructed siyah length added). When I personally was in the museum, I noticed that the Hun bows were indeed much shorter than the mongol bow on display there...

I used the v-splice only in the siyah-overlay, it is not in the limb itself. As I said earlier it served only to avoid bending the overlay part/ or finding suitable natural bent pieces. So it does make no constructional difference if I had used it or not. Of course this is not an exact reproduction, it?s far from that ( and it is not possible anyway because of lacking construction details), but more an experiment ;-) I?m curious how the very short bending part of the lower limb will work and if the glued-on siyah will stay on the limb.

JJ

JJ; I understand your situation and I enjoy the reproduction.

It is not certain that the horn belly plate is the same piece arriving at the siyah tip. Though this seems likely. the Khotan bow has a piece added exactly there.

I do not think these are rodent gnawing on the siyah plates as those are specific marks, as you probably know. Rodent gnawing can easily be detected without magnification. You say another cause, what would that be?

Nor does the wood core go to the end of the bow tip because, for instance the front bow, left side, there is what is probably a string notch in the siyah plate and there is a lack of corresponding notch in the wood core. So it seems like plate has compressed down into the siyah. Stephen's Khotan bow also shows this construction detail.

We cannot know how prevalent was the use of horn siyah plates because most bone plates are found in isolation or where the horn belly is not still in existence. They would be archaeologically invisible.

Like the Yanghai Sythian bows, it is quite impossible to know the construction of an ancient bow until we find one coming apart.

At any rate thankyou for the discussion as I myself have come to no complete understanding of these bows.

Jack, when looking at the detail photo of the siyah you notice the wood piece reaching until the end of the sideplates and the end of the belly hornstrip on the 2nd bow and until the end of the belly horn strip of the upper bow as well. That means that the wood is extended until the Siyah end in these cases. The fact that the string nock which is preserved on the second bow is not present in the underlying wood piece can indicate that the wood was shaped in a way that it did not extend to the front of the Siyah, or in other words, that the finished Siyah could have had a triangular cross section narrowed at the front and thicker on the belly side, where the wood was present. This would be my explanation. We see in the photo that the parts have separated and it is also clear that some of the pieces have shifted sideways.

As to the other explanation for a damage on an artefact of organic matter, there can be many reasons that we don?t know of. Nearly 2000 years time for lots of things to happen. For example it is possible that a crack appeared from drying in the material and subsequent a piece fell off when the artefact was moved or unearthed. We don?t know much about the methods which chinese illegal treasure seekers use.

JJ

The Belmesa bow from Egypt has two bone plates that meet on the back of the bow. The notch does not reach the core.

Bede, thanks for the reference on the Belmesa bow. I found no useful further information on it besides that it is a bone reinforced siyah and was given to Henry Balfour by Flinders-Petrie and that it is probably in the Pitt-Rivers Museum.... Do you know more?

JJ

There are good drawings in Henry Balfour, "The Archer's Bow in the Homeric Poems", The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol.51 (Jul. - Dec., 1921), pp. 289-309. The illustration you want is Fig. 14 on page 305.

It shows the bow ear from the side, belly and back and two cross sections. It has a deep rectangular sectioned core at the base of the ear just before it changes angle, but half way up the ear the section of the core has changed to a triangle, apex to the back. It is clear from the belly view that the core disappears before the nock and the tip is made of the two pieces of bone. There is a piece of sinew binding, incomplete, above the nock towards the tip.

Balfour writes:

A fragment of a composite bow, dating to the Roman period, found at Belmesa in Egypt, was given to me by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1897 for the Pitt Rivers Museum. This fragment testifies to the influence of the northern type of bow upon that of the Persians. It consists (Fig. 14) of the nock-bearing end of a bow, built up with horn, wood and sinews, overlaid with plates of bone, and differs markedly from the developed Persian bows of later times, but corresponds closely with a representation of a bow in the hands of King Chosroes II (Khosrau II), who conquered Egypt early in the seventh century A.D.

He illustrates the picture of Chosroes, but the similarity is only minor. What he probably meant was that, in contrast to modern Persian bows with recurved tips, this bow had straight tips as shown in Sasanian art on silver plates.