Chinese horn bow (drawing)

My translator says "Mets?nk?ynti" means "forest business" ... The caption below reads "Bow of the Bashkirs".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashkirs

I'll have a look if B. Adler has anything to say on their bows.

I can't see dimensions; but this seems to be a standard Qing horse bow. It seems that these things were manufactured and exported widely to Central Asia. Compare http://www.atarn.org/chinese/visible_bow/visible.htm , which is, however, a foot archery bow.

"Made in China" has a long history! :)

According to Adler, Die B?gen Nordasiens, the Bashkir bows were of Chinese or Mongolian design, averaging 143 cm in length. Covered in birch bark only on the back, the horn of the belly left visible. Sometimes decorated with symmetrical patterns.
The Museum f?r V?lkerkunde in Leipzig has (or had at Adler's times) a number of Bashkir bows that date back to the Battle of Leipzig (1813), when apparently large contingents of Bashkirs fought as archers in the Russian army! Unfortunately Adler does not mention whether they were mounted or on foot ...

"Mets?ll? k?ynti" means exlicitely hunting, alltough literally means walking on top of forest.

"Mets?nk?ynti" is probably another way(old?) for saying that.

Mets? = forest
Mets?n = akkusative or genetive of forest

Mets?stys = hunting
k?ynti = movnig, walking, visiting

And the bow does look like a Qing one on untrained eyes.

I wonder if the light coloured insert between the horn on the belly side of the handle is a bone belly plate. Can't remeber now, but isn't that often a feature of Bashkir bows?
Andrzej Abratowski showed me a full scale drawing of a Bashkir bow, though with smaller ears and more of a 'fenno-ugrian' look, which as far as I remeber had a bone plate on the belly side of the handle.

A small bone insert often appears in Chinese bows between the abutting end of the horn. But not as big as this drawing suggests.

The bone belly plates on the Baskir bows I've seen were always rather long, as far as I remeber. What drives my attention, is that those Baskhir bows were often not older than 18th cent, but the use of the bone belly plate alone on the bow handle reminds me of some old Mongolian bows that had only belly bone handle plate present.

My thoughts are inspired by Andrew Hall's writings on the developement of the bone reinforcment composites. My thinking is that such a long belly bone plate on late Baskhir bows could represent a lingering custom of using bone plates. If I remeber Andrew's article correctly, progressively bone plates were dissapearing from bows, the ear reinforcing plates did eariler than the handle plates, and the belly plate was the last one to be used.

The artist has not represented the grip riser, nor a splice in the siyah. Usually the horn tapers down to a feather edge which rests under the bridge. To rest the horn in a notch in the siyah would drive against the V-splice of the core, if there was one.

I have a Qing bow with a long bone slat in the grip. That this bow was collected from the Bashkirs. I would not doubt but my question is where was it made?

Similar bows are in Kazakh, Uzbek, and Swedish collections.

Good stuff, guys :)

Jack: Swedish? - do you know where in Sweden?

Go to the archive and find the name of a Swedish museum. If you were to study Dusan's old post on bows in Russian collections you would find a Bashkir made bow or two.

I had a Chinese bow (with the mark of a Beijing bowyer in the ear) that had the horn slabs exactly like this one. They started at either side of the handle and ran all the way over the "knee" and stopped, like on the illustrated example, right before where the string bridge would be.

That the construction was not optimal was proven by the fact that one of the horn slabs had delaminated near the handle because there was no sinew to hold it in case the bow unstrung.

Other Chinese bows have the horn join at the handle, which prevents this from happening. On these the horn slab often ends before the "knee".

Jack: I'd love to see your bow with the bone in the grip. You usually don't see the feature on 19th century bows of the type anymore, yours may very well be from earlier times. Or perhaps in remote regions older design features endured longer, something we see among others among Chinese minorities in the West.

-Peter

Qing bow

Thanks for posting!

I find this a very interesting specimen. It's construction features remind strongly of bows made in the 18th century. I see the horn was inside the handle on this one once. Some 18th century bows have the horn plate exposed as well, but otherwise exactly as on yours.

Is that birch-bark covering the ears? If so that's another hallmark of early Qing bow construction. Somewhere around the turn of the 18th to 19th century they seized the use of bark on the ears, and made them either plain, painted, or with ray-skin covering.

Great find, something else than the typical bows you find on the market.

-Peter

By the way, what does the decoration on the bark of the limbs look like?

(Earlier bows had irregular patterns roughly resembling tiger stripes, later bows had repetitive geometric patterns.)

-Peter

Peter; Why do you say that there was once horn inside the handle? It is now bone and does not appear to have been tampered with. Horn ends are sinew lashed under birch bark.

The birch bark decoration is a kind of naturalistic camouflage pattern with little painting. The siyahs have a darker color. Nock piece is horn v-grooved insert, one existing bridge of antler attached through the spongy core hole by sinew under the bark, repaired in mono filament fish line. Bark appears to have been shellacked by the drawing up and "pilling" of the varnish. Mid limb 17 by 39mm, 180 cm over the belly curves, LOA.

Sorry, I meant "bone" when I said horn! (I must be fixated on horn lately as I'm trying to find large enough slabs to attempt to make my first bow.)

Thanks for the additional info. It all seems to accord with the construction of earlier Qing bows.

There was only horn in this place in such a bow when both slabs touch in the handle, never a separate piece.

-Peter