https://greekreporter.com/2025/10/21/deadliest-weapon-bronze-age/
I await comment :)
I am always sceptical when someone says of an ancient technolgical leap that it happened 'right here and right now'. I am also not going to disagree either that someone made this, found it was better and then the idea flowed outward from there over time.
What intrigues me is the thought process of how did someone come up with this and what, who and how long did it take to get a successful prototype? It is a genius change turning a bag of 'waste products' into a masterful tool. Did his apprentices then take the idea to the wider world to make their fortune?
For example, I am master cheese maker in Waššukanni for the king of the fledgling state of Mitanni. One day my apprentice knocks over a shelf of cheeses, and two cheese wheels roll together to the lowest point in the room. In an instant, the war chariot is born, I sell the idea to the king, and Mitanni dominates Mesopotamia. Soon though, everyone wants my cheese wheel carts and before you know it, Egypt, Hatti and Assyria are coming at us from 3 sides.
Only the northern Britons fail, because crumbly cheese like Wensleydale and Cheshire makes for poor all-terrain chariot wheels!
Well, everybody knows that for bows to conquer the world you need to be using wargames rules that make advancing against them similar to the experience of troops going over the top at the Somme.
Shame no one told the Greeks, Macedonians or Romans about how they were wasting their time with various long, spikey weapons....
:P
Quote from: stevenneate on Oct 22, 2025, 07:12 AMWhat intrigues me is the thought process of how did someone come up with this and what, who and how long did it take to get a successful prototype?
I worked in a few high tech start-ups, and the conclusion I came to was that it's not the solution that is difficult, it's spotting that there is a problem to solve.
So once you've sat down and thought "is there actually something better than wood for making bows?" then coming up with the idea of a composite bow is not that difficult.
Similarly, once you've asked yourself whether there's a way of making your sledge more efficient, the wheel isn't difficult to imagine.
But then I was someone who was very good at making other people's ideas real, but who couldn't have an original idea to save my life...
Quote from: Nick Harbud on Oct 22, 2025, 08:50 AMShame no one told the Greeks, Macedonians or Romans about how they were wasting their time with various long, spikey weapons....
So, how would a Roman legion have done against massed English/Welsh bowmen?
Would have destroyed the bowmen by advancing quickly and shooting their way in with artillery.
The English/Welsh bowmen, painted in woad and supported by chariots would have scarpered quickly after a series of unsolicited bowel movements.
Quote from: Nick Harbud on Oct 22, 2025, 08:50 AMShame no one told the Greeks, Macedonians or Romans about how they were wasting their time with various long, spikey weapons....
The bow and the mace are the weapons of kings. Pointy sticks are for the masses.
Arrows also work well against the unarmoured masses and generally small shields used by those masses.
Quote from: stevenneate on Oct 22, 2025, 09:36 AMThe English/Welsh bowmen, painted in woad and supported by chariots would have scarpered quickly after a series of unsolicited bowel movements.
I was thinking more medieval longbowmen supported by guys in tin cans...
I know, but you only said "bowmen".
The thing about the composite bow that always make me pause is the huge length of time supposedly needed for the materials, especially the glue, to cure. It is one thing to say that a proven design needs a year or five to be carefully cured for maximum effect, but who on earth discovers that? How many of us have been impatient even just waiting for paint or glue to dry properly in a matter of hours?
We can probably assume that the properties of the materials were to some degree a known quantity. So our early inventor(s) might expect to have to leave the thing to cure. Whether they would be thinking of curing it for a year or five at the prototype stage may be doubtful. This understanding would come with experience.
On the whole, the ancient world wasn't driven by technological innovation in the way we are used to. The longbow (Welsh/English) was very effective, but its technology was completely familiar to Bronze Age archers (and earlier). Why wasn't it invented sooner? Perhaps because it was a PITA to use, or because people were happy with the bows they had, or because people made bows the way they had always made bows. Small incremental improvements in technique are more the ancient thing, rather than technological breakthroughs.
Even today technology isn't the war-winner that the military-industrial complex likes to imagine it is, as the various wars going on at present amply demonstrate (or at least, the technology that people were expecting to be dominant, isn't).
Of course, some archery experts get really cross at the idea of longbow versus "shortbow", saying the latter is a modern concept driven by a mistaken idea of
Anglo-Welsh exceptionalism. Danish bog bows from the late Iron Age are the same size as Mary Rose longbows.
I suppose the way I would vary what RichT is saying is to suggest that medieval English archers are specifically training to use a weapon optimised for war, massively overpowered for hunting Bambi in the forests when the sheriff isn't looking. Furthermore, the English archers have access to far better wood, bows for the construction of, than the Sumerians or even the Assyrians. Bronze Age monarchs want wood optimised for constructing palaces or crafting chariots, not creating weapons able to bring down a French knight at 150 paces. The composite bow, whenever invented, gives a powerful weapon for use from a chariot (or later, a horse). It maybe no coincidence that the one ancient civilisation to go in for long infantry self bows outside of Europe seems to have been India, again, far richer in wood resources than most of the Near East.
Quote from: DBS on Oct 22, 2025, 04:31 PMOf course, some archery experts get really cross at the idea of longbow versus "shortbow", saying the latter is a modern concept driven by a mistaken idea of
Anglo-Welsh exceptionalism.
And, of course, some medieval historians get cross with archery experts who are unfamiliar with sources :) This is particularly a bee in Clifford Rodger's bonnet. Probably, the neutral thing is to say there were a range of sizes and strengths of bow and the "longbow" evolved by the increasing selection of stronger bows that could be handled by more practiced archers. It was this combining of skilled archers, strong bows, developed supply chains and massed archery tactics create the "exceptionalism" which separate later medieval longbows from earlier medieval longbows, IMO. But that's a different topic :)
Ah, but that is precisely the point. It is not that longbows are technically that much more advanced than earlier weapons, or even that much longer (the height of the archer being a major consideration in every period), but that the longbowmen trained from an early age to use the bow as a weapon of war, not hunting with occasional use in war, and hence could manage greater draw weights. Combined with that, military culture in these isles evolved to encourage tactics relying on massed archery. That is why the 15th century longbow is a superior weapon system to that of the 4th century "German" with a six foot long bow in Denmark.
And there was me thinking it was scrofula...
Quote from: Imperial Dave on Oct 22, 2025, 06:44 PMAnd there was me thinking it was scrofula...
Erm. Bit lost there Dave. What did you think was scrofula?
The deadliest weapon...possibly a bit too Pratchetarian
Of course, the indisputable, "purest" weapon of war of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages is the mace. Simply, it has hardly any conceivable use other than for bashing out the brains of a human opponent. Any other contemporary weapon of which one can think probably has equal utility for hunting or (especially axes) as a tool. But you are not going to go hunting deer or hippopotami or whatever with a mace. This is surely why it becomes the weapon that denotes royalty and/or divinity. Whether it is reserved for such elites is of course for debate. But to New Kingdom pharaohs, is it his mace or his composite bow that more clearly denotes his status? I suspect the former.
Quote from: DBS on Oct 22, 2025, 07:08 PMSimply, it has hardly any conceivable use other than for bashing out the brains of a human opponent.
Quite useful when crushing the biscuit base for a cheesecake. But you may feel that that proves your point.
So, if I understand your earlier posts, massed bows weren't really a thing in early societies, because the lack of suitable trees meant that they were never a cheap option.
Then the Welsh came along with an excess of suitable wood, and an eye for a good deal. Once they had massed archers, then training them to handle bigger draw weights became worthwhile and then you get an evolutionary process that leads to Agincourt which may have been like going over the top at the Somme (which isn't far away).
Presumably, then opposing armies developed better armour and tactics which made the cost of training longbowmen unworthwhile.
Quote from: Cantabrigian on Oct 23, 2025, 10:42 AMThen the Welsh came along with an excess of suitable wood, and an eye for a good deal. Once they had massed archers, then training them to handle bigger draw weights became worthwhile and then you get an evolutionary process that leads to Agincourt which may have been like going over the top at the Somme (which isn't far away).
I'm not sure access to suitable bow wood was an issue for Europeans, certainly before the late middle ages. As for the Welsh having much to do with longbow development, that's yet another discussion :)
I suspect that material availability might have been an issue. Although other woods (such as elm) can be used, the best wood for longbows is European yew whose distribution is shown here.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Taxus_baccata_range.svg/1280px-Taxus_baccata_range.svg.png)
Certainly the Middle Ages saw the stock of yew in England undergoing rapid depletion due to its use for longbows and in the period thereafter yew staves were stocked as a strategic material in the Tower of London. This may account for why longbows fell out of use - no one could lay their hands on a bow to practise with. Nevertheless, as anyone who has ever wargamed the English Civil War will know, longbow units could still be found in England during the 17th Century.
Going back to the distribution map, yew is not found anywhere near Mesopotamia and staves would need to be imported if any Bronze Age archers felt the need to master the longbow. This is not to say that use of this wood for weapons is only a relatively recent phenomenom. For example, this picture of the Clacton Spear shows a weapon estimated to be 400,000 years old.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Clacton_Spear_2018.JPG/1280px-Clacton_Spear_2018.JPG)
Finally, Hardy and others have investigated other civilisations for their use of bows and, amongst others, noted the use of composite construction amongst First Nations warriors in North America.
While yew was certainly the best bow would for European self-bows, it wasn't the only one. By the later middle ages, the English (and other longbow users) were engaged in long range trade to obtain supplies (a lot of Tudor longbow staves came from Dalmatia, via Venice, and others from central Europe via the Baltic). So, in theory, the trade networks in the Ancient Middle east should have been capable of shipping appropriate wood, even if not yew.
(In the map, green shows native range and yellow shows naturalized.)
Obviously, absence of yew will mean no use of yew bows [unless obtained by trade as Anthony points out]. Yet apparently, presence of yew does not mean use of yew bows, unless I am forgetting the Pyrenaean, Breton, Alpine, Greek, Carpathian, Caucasian and Norse longbowmen, sadly overlooked by history. There seems to be something else to the decision to make bows out of yew (and to make them long) than availability of raw materials.
(Edit to add - though Wikipedia has just reminded me that eg Ötzi had a yew longbow.)
Quote from: RichT on Oct 23, 2025, 01:58 PMNorse longbowmen, sadly overlooked by history.
Yew was a common wood for longbows in the Viking period. We have more Viking yew longbows than actual medieval English ones.
Quote from: Nick Harbud on Oct 23, 2025, 01:35 PMFinally, Hardy and others have investigated other civilisations for their use of bows and, amongst others, noted the use of composite construction amongst First Nations warriors in North America.
The research article from which the Greek Reporter took their story deals with this issue. The author considers them to not be an indigenous innovation but much later introductions (via Siberia), and nor are they the same design of bow lacking one of the three key materials or the glue or both.
You can find it here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-025-09750-4
I'm a bit confused about how the author is using the word millennium.
QuoteFirstly, recent scholarship indicates that partial com-
posite bow technology in North America was an Asian import, likely introduced during the late first or early second millennium CE
I think I understand that one - about 500-1500 AD.
QuoteFurthermore, the bows of the Inuit, Chukchi, and Koryak populations exhibit features that appeared in composite bows only after the second millennium CE
So that means in the last 25 years???
The author of the paper, Gabriel Šaffa, may not necessarily be a native English speaker so it is possible that when he said "only after the second millennium CE" he meant something more like "only in the second millennium CE" i.e. only after the first millennium CE. If that is the case perhaps Springer's editorial process ought to have picked that up, but there we are!
He obtained his PhD from the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice in 2023 (The Evolution of Human Socio-Cultural Adaptations: A Phylogenetic Cross-Cultural Perspective). He now appears to hold a research position at UCL.
Scrolling to the bottom of Springer's page reveals a link to a supplementary material document containing more illustrations of the objects he cites. You can find it here:
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs10816-025-09750-4/MediaObjects/10816_2025_9750_MOESM1_ESM.docx