How Heavy were Iron Age Bows? Part 1

At the moment, many archery enthusiasts are telling anyone who will listen that soldiers’ bows usually had draw weights of 100 lbs and more (Deer hunters today usually use bows with a draw weight on the order of 50 lbs, casual or target archers often use bows about half as heavy, and even hunters of larger game rarely use a bow with a draw weight of 100 lbs or more). In other words, you could draw the bow to its full draw length by hanging it string-down and suspending 100 lbs or more from the middle of the string.  If this idea is correct, many men in the ancient world did something which is much more physically demanding than is commonly thought. This week, I would like to post some of the evidence which I know which might be relevant to the strength of bows used in the eastern Mediterranean around the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE. I hope that some of my readers can suggest more sources.

Very few bows from the first millennium BCE survive, and no text from that period describes the weight of a bow numerically. People who argue that archers in the Aegean and the western steppes used very heavy bows usually point to four main sources:

• A replica of a bow from a cemetery at Yanghai in Xinjiang (East Turkestan) which Adam Karpowicz and Stephen Selby published in the Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries. They claim a date around 1000 BCE and call it Scythian, but that is hundreds of years before anyone uses the term, and far away from the most easterly of the nations who forereigners called Scythian, Saka, or Kimmerians. Their replica had a draw weight of 120 lbs at 28”, but they suggested that the original could have had a draw weight anywhere in the 80-140 lb range. They also suggested that western Scythian bows were made of laminated wood rather than not wood, horn, and sinew like the bow which they reproduced. Source: Karpowicz, Adam, and Selby, Stephen. “Scythian Bow from Xinjang.” Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries Vol. 53 (2010) Available as a PDF here.
• The boast of Anaxagoras of Olbia in the Crimea that he had shot an arrow 282 fathoms around 300 BCE: Wallace McLeod, “The Range of the Ancient Bow,” Phoenix, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. 1-14
• The bows and arrows which sank onboard the Mary Rose in 1545. The dimensions of the bows after shrinking were plugged into a formula by a Dutch physicist and used to estimate the original draw weights as in the 100-180 lb range (see Hardy and Strickland, The Great Warbow (2006) … my copy is in Canada and I was unable to check it when I wrote this post in Austria). {For my current understanding of the different estimates by experts, see below [1]}. Some people online claim that there is a lot of dispute about the weight which these bows would have had when new, but I do not know any such dispute amongst people who have carefully examined and measured the artifacts, beyond the mathematician’s warnings that models are only as good as the data and assumptions that go in to them. Other things worth reading for people interested in late medieval English archery are Jim Bradbury’s The Medieval Archer, the book Weapons of Warre (I have not seen it), and Kelly DeVries’ “Catapults are Not Atomic Bombs: Towards a Redefinition of ‘Effectiveness’ in Premodern Military Technology,” War in History 4 (1997) pp. 475-491
• A study by Adam Karpowicz of Turkish bows in Istanbul. Karpowicz measured the bows, estimated their draw weight by eye, then calculated it using a formula developed by the same Dutch professor (Adam Karpowicz, “Ottoman bows – an assessment of draw weight, performance and tactical use,” Antiquity 81 (2007) pp. 675-685). He found that draw weights varied between 40 and 240 lbs (!) at 28” with a mean of 120 lbs.
• Statistics collected by the Qing Dynasty, who tested soldiers with different weights of bows and recorded the results. These show that a small minority of archers were capable of using bows with draw weights over 100 lbs, and that the Manchus thought that the ability to draw heavy bows was a valuable military skill. Most of the published figures date to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries. Peter Dekker, a Dutch amateur historian, has gathered many sources from books which I do not have to hand on his website; some other sources which have been recommended to me are Stephen Selby, Chinese Archery (Hong Kong University Press, 2000) (Bookfinder link), the T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu of Sung Ying-hsing (1637, translated in Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century pp. 261-268 [Bookfinder link] [Wayback Machine link]) which allegedly gives the weights of bows used by strong, average, and weak archers in catties. (Thanks to Benjamin H. Abbott and Timo Nieminen for the reading list)

(Readers, can you suggest any other sources?)

(A dozen or so sites in Europe have produced bowstaves dating between the Neolithic and the 10th century. I do not think that any date to the first millennium BCE. Not many estimates of their draw weight have been published; there are some unpublished reproductions circulating around the Internet, like this one commissioned by Steve Stratton, and people with lots of time on their hands might want to check them out).

Because there was a lot of resistance to the news about the Mary Rose bows amongst the archery community in Great Britain, who had been shooting much lighter bows and liked to believe that they were practising the same skill as the archers at Crecy, some people are very evangelical about preaching the gospel of heavy bows. All of these studies were written by experts and published in academic venues where other experts made sure that they were not making any obvious errors. Yet the Mary Rose and Istanbul bows are two thousand years later than the period which I study, and the Yanghai cemetery is several thousand kilometers away and Selby and Karpowicz cannot date it more precisely than “1000-400 BCE.” The Manchus are even later. Neither English longbows and arrows nor Turkish bows and arrows nor Manchu bows and arrows have much in common with any kind of bow and arrow used in the first millennium BCE, although it is possible that the longbows attested in the Neolithic and in the second millennium CE were used in the intervening period. Very few bows survive from Europe in the first millennium BCE or the first millennium CE.  And Anaxagoras’ shot was such an extraordinary achievement that it was commemorated with an inscription.

In the next post in this series, I will show some of the evidence which the enthusiasts don’t like to tell people about.

Edit 2022-07-26: the 1972 book From Sumer to Rome (danger, danger Will Robinson!) p. xviii claims that “the (which?) ancient composite bow has been estimated to have been capable of exerting 125 pounds of pull” As usual, the book gives no source. But the idea of heavy bows in antiquity did exist in the 20th century.

Edit 2022-08-17: in an earlier post I talk about Pharaoh Amenhotep’s boast that he shot through copper targets

This post was drafted years ago, but not posted because of lack of time and not being sure it would reach as large an audience as a printed article.  If you want me to keep writing online, please share my posts with interested people or donate.  Thanks to Giannis Kadoglou for bringing up this topic at The Battle of Plataea 2.5k online conference.

[1] The mathematician who modeled the Mary Rose bows warned Robert Hardy’s readers that models are only as good as the data and assumptions that go in to them. Since 2015 I have discovered an apparent disagreement between researchers who cite the same mathematical authorities. From an email I sent in November 2020:

There seem to be two estimates based on physics calculations by Kooi and Pratt, one that the largest group of bows would have pulled around 110-130 lbs new and the other that the largest group would have pulled around 150-160 lbs at 30″. Do you know where the different estimates are coming from? Are there any other approaches that you respect?

The books I know which make their own estimates are:
Robert Hardy, Longbow: A Social and Military History (1992)
Hardy and Strickland, The Great Warbow (2005) {high estimate based on Kooi}
H.D.H. Soar, Secrets of the English War Bow (2006) {low estimate}
And a chapter in Weapons of Warre volume 2 {low estimate based on Kooi}

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(drafted circa 2015, scheduled 9 April 2022)