Talk:Hun bow

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Untitled[edit]

Recent archeological digs in China show that a proto-celtic people living in the area introduced the recurve bow to the Asians, not the other way around.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2502chinamum.html

I would suggest an update to reflect this- unless you can prove the NOVA show and it's participants to be a fraud.

Well, the link seems to be rather excited, and doesn't seem to mention anything about the bow they found, nor is it very clear on dates, but I suppose that the Tocharians, like most steppe nomads for millennia, may very well have had composite bows. Who thought of them first, and who the Huns were exactly, is less clear. Richard Keatinge 10:18, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


Cleanup[edit]

This article needs major cleanup. The only reference 404s, it is an historical article without a single date or even a century, the tone is breathlessly gushing, and numerous performance claims are made (some sounding suspiciously like they may have arisen from RPG rules) which may or may not be true but could only be determined by experiment or detailed historical references, neither or which are cited. Further, some of the claims just don't make sense (e.g. claim that being composite improves accuracy -- it doesn't -- or that recurves are inherently faster -- they're not.) Finally the image (added by User:Ulv, who seems to be inactive) is obviously at best a reconstruction without information about how, why or when (which demands the question, how do we know it is accurate?), and in fact seems to be a commercial model.

Ah. Wait. While googling around I found http://huntingsociety.org/ArcheryHist.html. Maybe a copyvio to boot... -- Securiger 02:46, 28 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The statement that Huns are the ancestors of both the Turks and the Mongols is overly declarative, doesn't make sense internally I don't think, unless they mean Turkmenistan vs. Turkey, and seems to contradict the wiki page about the Huns and their origin.

And the statement about asymmetric composite bows being brought in by the Huns is also unreferenced and contradicted by a suggestion in the recent authoritative: Roman Military Equipment from the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome (Paperback). M.C. Bishop, J.C. Coulston. ISBN-10: 1842171593 ISBN-13: 978-1842171592, which suggests that Roman composite bows (originating from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean) were asymmetrical. AFAICS there isn't any actual evidence on the Hunnic bow that differentiates it from any other composite bow of its approximate time and place. I would therefore suggest deleting this article. The few interesting bits would do as well in the Hun section on composite bows. Richard Keatinge 09:55, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Redundancy[edit]

This article currently makes several redundant statements that should be cleaned up and made more concise.

I have rewritten the composite bow article to include the few good bits. I propose to blank this article, with a view to deletion, fairly soon. Any comments? Richard Keatinge 20:31, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I have done it. I found most of this page to be unreferenced, some of it contradicted by available references. As I said a few days ago, I've incorporated the good bits into composite bow. While I'm at it, AFAIK the Hun bow was simply a normal Eurasian composite bow. I'm not actually familiar with any good evidence that even suggests that the Hun bow was interestingly different to the widespread composite bows of Eurasia at the time. If anyone can come up with such evidence it might be worth reinstating this page.Richard Keatinge 09:15, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

At this edit I have redirected a page about a dubious modern construct with dubious and unreferenced assertions to the relevant and referenced section of Composite bow. I hope that this is agreeable. Richard Keatinge (talk) 17:43, 14 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]