Stephen,
I know you are probably working on this, but I would be very interested to know what the cross sections of the ears were like (i.e. how they transitioned from round to oval). Were the string nocks spliced into the siyahs or overlaid?
Stephen Selby
Romain: the shafts are not bamboo. Poplar, I think. And one point about the arrowheads: they are nothing like any iron arrowheads that I have seen in the markets. They are much finer, and there are a number of tri-lobed heads that I have never seen in iron arrowheads after the Warring States period.
Bede. I'll do a drawing. I saw another bow like this but in much worse condition. However, it still had the remains of the horn caps on the tips of the siyahs. From that, I know that the string nocks were overlaid.
Bede
Stephen,
I have seen trilobed arrowheads like these from Moho or Jurchen excavations in Siberia.
It looks a short bow for the arrows. Did the nock overlays extend past the end of the core? I look forward to your drawing.
jack farrell
Stephen. According to drawings of V Karasev, iron trilobed points were common in Central Asia from several hundred BC ending about the 4th century AD. The rhombic points are consistant with finds of the 12th century in that area.
A more likely source might be M. Semjonowa, We Slavs, pp. 348+349. These three blade points have been found in archaeological sites in Prikame (sp) in Tatarstan; the Kama River area, and the upper Volga dating from the 1st through the 9th AD.
Stephen Selby
We haven't done a C14 test yet; but I'm expecting this bow and arrows to come in at about 1100AD.
S.
Bede
Stephen,
I checked by photographs and the three-lobed, iron, tanged arrow head I remembered was labelled Jurchen, about 1100.
Jack is right about the early dates of three-lobed arrow heads. The earliest ones were small and sometimes had no bolster between the tang and the blades. They also seem to be more angular. As they developed, the blades seem to have shrunk, perhaps to aid armour penetration. I have seen some of the wider ones associated with antler whistling heads. It just shows that the basic design was used in different forms.
Stephen Selby
Bede wrote:
Stephen,
I know you are probably working on this, but I would be very interested to know what the cross sections of the ears were like (i.e. how they transitioned from round to oval). Were the string nocks spliced into the siyahs or overlaid?
I'm off to Oz (Gold Coast) tomorrow, so I had to do this drawing in a rush. Hope it helps.
Andrew Hall
According to Khudyakov, the three-bladed tanged heads were the most common iron types of the Huns. The smaller forms in the quiver were common with the ancient Turks of the 5th-10th centuries. They were gradually superseded by the simpler flat types (which also date back to the Huns) but odd finds of three-bladed types have been made in central Asia and southern Siberia dating up to the 14th century.
It is interesting to compare this bow to the Yuan dynasty bow in the Xining museum discussed before. This bow is much narrower, and has less limb/siyah reflex angle. It gives the impression that it would stack a bit with long draws. Interesting nock design.
Stephen, it is possible to determine whether the bow has a bone plate in the grip belly? This seems to be regarded as the identifying feature of the Mongol bow by Russian archaeologists and was fitted to the later Omnogov bow from Mongolia. I am assuming that the conquering Mongols imported their military equipment when forming the Yuan dynasty.
Stephen Selby
Stephen, it is possible to determine whether the bow has a bone plate in the grip belly? This seems to be regarded as the identifying feature of the Mongol bow by Russian archaeologists and was fitted to the later Omnogov bow from Mongolia. I am assuming that the conquering Mongols imported their military equipment when forming the Yuan dynasty.
The grip is bound with birch bark, so I would need to do an x-ray. But my impression is that there are no bone plates. You are right in pointing out that 'Yuan' is a period with many cultures on the playing field: Yuan does not necessarily mean 'Mongol'. While the Mongols probably used their own domestic equipment, by Yuan times they were not necessarily the cultural majority on the battlefileds, even if they were the bosses.
Bede
Stephen,
That is a valuable point about the ethnic pluralism of the Yuan state. The fact that the Mongols ruled the empire neither means that remains are Mongol in origin nor that the armies were centrally supplied.
There are indications in some places and times that this was so, but the site of the later Golden Horde in Russia would be a prime example of a thin overlay of Mongol commanders and aristocracy over a predominately Qichaq/Kuman nomadic population. I doubt very much that the Mongols equipped their Qichaq t?mens with Mongol-style bows. The soldiers would have used their own bows until they broke or they were replaced with issued or captured equipment.
Even artwork can be misleading. Some scholars think that the armour and weapons shown in the World History of Rashid ed-Din were actually Turkish and Khwarazmian with only a few Mongol features. After all, the illustrators were not battlefield reporters. However, that being said, there is still much that is useful in the illustrations and they can be compared with other works like the Demotte Shahnameh to get an idea how the depictions changed over a few decades.
The Omnogorov bow is considerably later than the Yuan Dynasty and though the shape seems to be in conformation with the earlier bows it should be used only for comparison. Once firmly dated bows of the Mongolian Imperial period are found, we will be better off at judging these things.
