The bone of a steppe bow
A steppe bow was wood, horn and sinew held together with glue, stiffened at the grip and tips with strips of antler. In European graves the wood, horn, sinew and glue are all gone. The best find, from a grave in Vienna, is seven antler strips. The reconstruction built from it has twenty-five parts.
Found: a warrior's grave at Wien-Simmering, Vienna, Austria.
How it worked
Three materials, three jobs. A wooden core. Horn glued on the side that faces the archer, because horn resists being squashed. Sinew glued on the back, because sinew resists being stretched. Short enough to shoot from a horse, and bent back on itself when unstrung.
What actually survives
Almost never the bow. The antler strips that stiffened the grip and the ends are the only parts that last in the ground. The Wien-Simmering grave gave seven of them, the only nearly complete set known from inside the late Roman empire. Everything else in the familiar reconstruction comes from other sites, pictures of archers from Central Asia, and modern bowyers' judgement.
The part nobody has
Hunnic bows are usually shown lopsided, with one limb longer than the other. But the working limbs, the parts that would show that, do not survive in any European find. The lopsided shape is inferred from uneven tip plates and from bows found much further east. It may well be right. It is still an inference.
What this card will not tell you
How far it shot, or how hard it was to draw. No ancient writer records either, and every figure in circulation comes from modern replicas, some of them built from bows found far from Europe.
- Riesch and Rutschke, 'The Hunnish reflex bow from Vienna-Simmering: archaeology, reconstruction and practice of an equestrian weapon in Late Antiquity', Waffen- und Kostümkunde 54/1 (2012), 77–120
- Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns (1973)
- Kim, The Huns (2016)
- Picture: rendered from our own 3D model, the one on the workbench: a reconstruction, not a record of how it looked.