The Ancients - Horse Archery

Episode Date: July 19, 2020

The horse archer was one of the most feared warriors of antiquity. Triumphing mobility and fluidity, these swift skirmishers came to epitomise a feared ‘eastern’ style of warfare. Renowned historical weapons expert and avid horse archer Mike Loades joins me to chat through horse archery's ancient history. Where did it originate? How did this method of warfare come to be? What sort of equipment did they use? Mike explains all. We first focus on this warfare method’s importance among ancient Near Eastern cultures before taking an in-depth look at antiquity’s superlative horse archers: the Scythians!Mike is the author of ‘War Bows’, an in-depth history of four iconic weapons that changed the nature of warfare. 

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Mike Lodes is joining me today, the military historian who's covered topics varying from Agincourt to feudal Japan. And today we're going to be talking about ancient horse archery. In particular, we're going to be looking at its importance for the ancient Near Eastern cultures, such as the Parthians, the Persians and the

Assyrians. But we're also going to be looking at its importance for another culture, such as the Parthians, the Persians and the Assyrians. But we're also going to be looking at its importance for another culture, north of the Caspian Sea, north of the Black Sea, that dominated the Eurasian steppes. I am of course talking about the Scythians. Enjoy. Mike, it is an honour to have you on the podcast today. Always a pleasure, Tristan. Now, we are talking about a fascinating topic, ancient horse archery, and this is a subject very close to your heart. Yes, it is.

Not only is it something that I've written about quite extensively, not least of all in my book, Warbos, but it's something that I've written about quite extensively, not least of all in my book War Bows, but it's something that I still do and love. It is my passion in life. So let's start at the very beginning. Where do we think or do we know horse archery originates? That's actually a much harder question to answer than you might think. And the answer is it probably originates in several places independently. It doesn't necessarily have to be one of these things that was invented in one place and then transmitted. So where it really starts is it starts with chariot archers. So before I put a date to it, let's get that sequence. It starts with chariot archery because early horses were very small. Zoologically, the horse is a very tiny animal and was gradually nurtured to size by man.

But chariots allowed you to use two tiny horses to pull a wheeled vehicle, whereas one of those individual horses was not yet strong enough to carry an armored warrior. By sort of 1500 BC, 1400 BC, you start to see the occasional little image of a sort of, you know, young teenage boy in a loincloth on a horse riding possibly as a messenger, but still not for armored men. We have different types of horse, of course, in different regions. So the steppe pony, which is the kind of, you know, stocky, big-headed, thick-boned horse that we see today incarnated as the Mongol horse,

they were possibly more muscular and sturdier to take a single rider earlier. So it probably started in the steppes with horses like that. But in China, where you have, you know, a similar kind of horse, they, you know, they started with the chariot. Moving over to Asia Minor, of course, we think of chariots very much as being the Egyptians and the Hittites and subsequently the Assyrians. Now, those cultures are using a different type of horse, more the sort of desert horse, more like the sort of Arab fine-boned. So it may have taken a little longer for them to become, you know, big enough to be riding horses. And certainly the chariot archer remained prominent in that region for much longer. So it's not until about 700 BC that we'd see the Assyrians making the switch from chariot archers to horse archers. And when they do, they make a very curious switch. For a chariot archer, you work with a driver. So you have

somebody driving your chariot and you stand alongside them. And you have, you know, on the battlefield, a similar mobility to the horse archer, you know, you gallop in, do a wheeling turn, shooting all the way in, shooting as you turn and shooting behind you on the way out or skirmishing in a sort of a dogfight with other chariots. But you're very reliant on the driver reading the battle, especially when you're in that dogfight situation, because you imagine, you know, some of those early battles where they talk about, you know, 10,000 chariots or so, in a desert landscape, imagine the dust just from the wheels and the horses' hooves. I mean, it must have been impenetrable. You wouldn't be able to see. Very similar, I think, to a sort of World War II

dogfight between Spitfires and Messerschmitts. You know, the enemy coming out of the sun or coming out of a cloud and suddenly they're on you without warning. And I think some of those early chariot battles must have been very similar to that. And you're very dependent on your driver maneuvering you into the right position to get an optimum shot so what we see um on those wonderful um reliefs in the british museum of the uh some century assyrians is when they start to make the change they have a pair of horses with the driver on one horse and the horse archer on the parallel horse, they're still riding as a horse team. And the driver has reached across with his left hand and he is holding the reins. He has control of the bridle of the left hand horse. The horse archer, just as he was on the chariot, is still a passenger.

He's not actually riding his own horse. I did it once. It is the scariest, most unnerving thing I have ever done in my life. I did it in Turkey, in the village of Haran, which in fact is the site of Karai, one of the most famous horse archery battles with the Parthians and the Romans, which I'm sure we'll come to, knowing you. But that experience in this rock-strewn gully of having somebody else control your horse, it's just unnerving and it's no surprise that that didn't last very long, and that they soon went to horse archers riding independently. But did it start there?

Did it start with the Scythians? Probably with the Scythians a good deal earlier, not least of all because in that Black Sea region they've got access to those stockier horses and they were able to support the weight of a grown man rider earlier. That's amazing so it sounds like there are two separate strands as it were to the origins of the horse archer and like north of the Caspian Black Sea and south of the Caspian Black Sea? I think that's probably right. You know, future archaeology may contradict that.

We're still, you know, glimpsing at shadows. But yeah, I think that's probably right. OK, you mentioned Carrae, so let's go on to go into carry first before we go into the scythians we carry as you said it's a famous battle of horse archers in the eastern culture does that battle epitomize like horse archery success in the near east during antiquity in some ways uh i mean it's a fantastic example of the advantages of horse archers on the battlefield. But I think we also need to make the distinction between battlefield horse archery and the tremendous advantage of having horse archers in an army for campaigns. Don't forget, battles have always been a relatively small aspect of warfare. Campaigns are a much larger aspect. So scouting and tracking and ambushing and disrupting supply

chains and all of that raiding, that is a crucial part of warfare. It isn't just about the set-piece battle. So for all those other functions, you don't really get a better troop than the horse archer. But what Kara shows us is on the set-piece battlefield, they are also tremendous, especially when part of combined forces. And what we have is the combination of horse archers and heavy cavalry, cataphracts. So the cataphracts, the Parthian cataphracts, this is what the distinction between heavy cavalry and light cavalry is really to do with armor.

Heavy cavalry are heavily armored, heavily protected and defended. That means they can have closer contact with the enemy. It means they can ride in to a massive enemy. It means they can be the hammer cracking the nut. enemy. It means they can be the hammer cracking the nut. But once that nut is split open, then the horse archers can ride in and pick out the fruit. I'm rather overextending that metaphor, I think. You get the idea. So, you know, Serena's generalship was brilliant because he had this legendary foe, the Roman army machine, with all its discipline. One of the things it epitomizes is a difference in thinking between East and West. And we see it still today. It has

gone on throughout history. In the East, in the broadest sense of the word. You have the horse archer as the most elite type of troop, but you also have javelin men and other light cavalry. They have a hit and run modus operandi. They appear from nowhere, they engage, and then they disappear and they've gone in a flurry of dust. They have mobility and fluidity. It's like fighting air. It's like trying to swat a fly. In fact, one of the highest orders of military merit in the Egyptian army was a golden fly, sort of in tribute to that idea. You know, a fly can be the most annoying of creatures. It will land on your hand, you go to swat it, it's gone again,

but it comes back again. And horse archers were very much like that. Whereas the Romans typify a Western style of warfare, which goes on to the Viking shield wall. It goes on to, you know, all the entrenchments and fortifications of the 17th and 18th century and into the First World War and beyond. It's the idea of defending a fixed position. And those are two very different military ideas and are the biggest

contrast between East and West so at Karaj we get this military philosophy put to the test you you've got the Romans with their shield wall and testudo fixed possession and all marching as one, all, you know, a single unit acting as a homogenous creature, being attacked by these independently minded, heroic warriors with flair and flourish and tremendous skill riding their horses and shooting their bows. tremendous skill riding their horses and shooting their bows. And of course, they can ride in, they can shoot their bows out of range of a peel and throw, and their arrows can sneak through and start to pick off a few men.

And as a few fall, the Romans try and fill the gaps and bring in men. But they're starting to fall, and you concentrate on one area. It's starting to decimate a little bit by these harassing volleys from the horse archers, and then you send in your cataphracts. You've got a small hairline crack on the nut, and then you send in these heavy men to go thump, and they smash into them. heavy men to go thump and they smash into them. They carried a kind of lance, a spear called a contus,

which they use with two hands and they stab vertically down with enormously powerful stabs, stabbing down with that. They also couched it to run in for that first contact. Both of them, the horse archers and the cataphracti, are benefiting from a new technology and that is the horned saddle, later adopted by the Romans, and it evolved from the Scythian saddle, and then we're going to come to that but the horn saddle has four horns at each corner of it that means it doesn't have any stirrups stirrups have not yet been invented and they're really not they have advantages which we can come to but they're really not necessary to either shoot a bow or charge with a lance the horn saddle has two horns at the front and the horse archer can lean into those rising his seat just off the

back of the horse so that he has not got the the bouncing undulations of the horse at the moment of losing his bow and the cataphracti has got the horns at the back which hold him in so he can deliver an impact charge crashing into the enemy without fear of being shot backwards off his horse so the technology of that horn saddle assisted both the heavy and the light cavalry of Serena's army and it was good generalship of saying where to hit and when to hit and which of those two troop types to use, using those combined forces intelligently, that absolutely caused havoc with that Roman idea. It not only broke an army, it broke an idea that we can all stand strong together, not if we crack you apart.

That's fascinating. So it's, as you say, it's a combination of combined arms warfare with this mobility and fluidity which of course the horse archers were such a key part of. Does this epitomise eastern warfare for almost all of antiquity? Well I think all of antiquity and beyond to the present day. Wow, that's remarkable. As you say, it's this complete contrast, as you said, with the Western idea, as you said, of heavier infantry and cavalry, but you say fighting together. Yes, absolutely.

But the distinction is this Western idea of massing all your troops to defend a few square feet of ground. You know, it reached its most absurd during the horrors of the First World War. But that idea has always been in there in Western warfare. And it's the idea of the shield wall or the Roman Tastuda and the legions and all of that it's there whereas that fluidity of the east of coming in and disappearing like a wind um has always been there and you know I mean we see it today uh in the fight against terrorism it it's such a difficult enemy to engage so you know it's very much in that thinking and with the near eastern cultures obviously one of the most famous things with horse archery in antiquity one of the most famous techniques

was called the parthian shot but should that technique just be linked to the parthians absolutely not it was made famous by roman writers recording the notable defeat of their army at carra and parthians obviously used it but no it's innate to being a horse archer that you can shoot in all four directions around your horse so you need to be able to shoot forwards and you need to be able to shoot behind you. To have a horse and an expensive warrior, and they were the elite warriors of these cultures. The cultures that had horse archers, the horse archers were the elite aristocratic class of people. We have so much more primary source literature

about horse archery and about the composite bow from these cultures because they were writing for a literate audience. People who could read would read books about this. We don't have any literature about the English longbow any literature about the English longbow during the period when it was used in warfare. The first record we have of it being written is by Elizabeth the first Latin tutor, Roger Ascombe, who wrote a work, Toxophilus, which is a very good work, but you know he's writing it in the mid 16th century after the longbow has gone out of military use. But we have in China, and in the Arab world, and in the Turkish and Ottoman world, we have an abundance of treaties from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries talking about the use of horse archers and the use of the composite bow.

So that's a signifier, one of many, that these are elite troops. You know, they're highly, highly skilled. And they're expensive because they're the elite people. And they have to put horses, plural, into the field because your horse can get shot. So you always have to have a string of horses. You also have to have a string of horses on campaign so you can keep changing horses so your horse doesn't tire, it's not too tired by the time he gets to the battle. So any horse archer's got to have four, five, six horses with him. So he's an expensive troop to field. So he needs to be able to deliver as many arrows as possible into the enemy. So when that is in a fixed battle

situation, obviously, as he's riding in, he can shoot, he can get a shot off as he turns around. But you're going to waste all that energy and expense if you're not shooting while you're riding away. Because as you ride away, you're covering the same distances. So if you start shooting at, say, 40, 50 meters before you get to their front line, then you want to carry on shooting for that same distance as you ride away. Similarly, you need to be able to shoot ambidextrously. All the authorities, from China to Turkey to Iran, all of the ancient sources talk about the necessity of horse archers being ambidextrous because you need to be able to shoot either side of your horse,

forward and back. Take the famous Mongol technique, the tulmugha, which is like a sort of pincer movement, not coming around the sides, but coming to the front of an enemy. So imagine a straight enemy front line. And the tulmugha had squadrons of horse archers, both on the right flank and the left flank.

And they would ride in in shooting and crossing over so they're both doing concentric loops that kind of overlap each other so so there is a constant flow of archers at the front line delivering arrows well in order for that to happen one of those squadrons has to be shooting left-handed. If the enemy is only one side of them and they're coming in from two sides, if you can picture that, one side has to be shooting left-handed. And then as it loops round, it'll be shooting round on the other side. So it has to switch to be able to shoot right-handed. So being ambidextrous and being able to shoot at all angles is innate to chariot archery and it is innate to all horse archery. We have the word Parthian shot,

which simply describes what one in ordinary language might call a backshot. And we have that word sort of in honour of the great success of the Parthians at Karai, but no, they did not originate it. The skill involved in something like that, for the Near Eastern nobility, were they being raised from a very young age to learn how to shoot a bow from horseback? Absolutely, absolutely. The parallels with European chivalrous upbringing are direct, you know, so the Arabs had a thing

called furusiyya, and furusiyya is very much like the code of chivalry, but it also, you know, so it has codes of honour within it, codes of behaviour, codes of etiquette, and at the top of it is the importance of specific martial skills of which horsemanship is number one or archery is number one um they're kind of joint number one uh and but then you also have swordsmanship and don't forget the horse archer was never a single weapon warrior because you know at some stage you may need to engage at close quarters so almost i think well certainly all horse archery cultures also carried a sword um most i think if not all carried a mace many carried javelins um a little case of three or six javelins for melee fighting, which they could use either, you know,

as a short stabbing weapon or to throw, you know, 10 metres, 20 metres, close range javelins were used in great deal by horse archers. And some also carried lances. They were always a very versatile troop. And as I said earlier, you mustn't just think of their use for the fixed battle. Warfare is about campaigns. And having troops that are versatile and mobile are invaluable, but they're no good on their own. It's no, you know, at Canary, if Serena had only had horse archers, they would have, you know, been a great annoyance to the Roman shield wall and Testudo, but they would unlikely to have broken through.

actually crack the nut open and expose the vulnerable nut within. Then the horse archers could really exploit that. And the more they exploited it, the more the cataphract could come in and so on and so forth. But just on its own, against the dense fortification, like a shield war, horse archers have a limited annoyance factor. But have them ambush a supply train have them um frustrate troop movements when a general is trying to organize his men on the battlefield and they can't get them into position properly that it's their versatility that makes them so incredibly useful versatility indeed and the importance that as you've just mentioned of combined arms warfare let's head north to the bigger brother of the near eastern horse archery civilizations as it were

who were the Scythians? Ah the Scythians are most extraordinary people and and we're we're learning so much more about them with recent archaeology. So they ended up spreading as far east and south as Iran and as far east as China. But they originated in the sort of Black Sea area. And they were horse archers and horsemen, and they were nomadic warriors. But it's the fact that they spread so much is not only a tribute to their military expertise, it also shows that over time they changed as they merged with other populations but taking their warfare tactics with them so i think if you talk about early scythians you're talking about one set of people in a fairly confined locale and you talk about later scythians you're really talking about something different because

the spread on one level, you could say, has diluted the core Scythian identity. But another way you could say it's just it's simply expanded it. So by the time we get to Periclean Athens, where they're recruiting Scythians to be the policemen of the city, We're probably talking about a slightly different people to those that Herodotus was writing about. Because you mentioned them slightly earlier when we were talking about the origins of horse archery and how there seems to be two different strands.

Was it these early Scythians who developed horse archery north of the Black Sea? Yes, I think it was. There are various clues and we really can't be certain, but it seems that they did. I would probably argue that the Scythians were the first. And one of the curious things is the Scythian bow. We can't really know, did the Scythian bow come first or the angular bow come first? They're both certainly extant by about sort of 1500 BC, possibly earlier. Well, most certainly earlier.

And they are so different. The angular bow is the one we see used by the Egyptians and the Hittites and the Assyrians in their chariots. And it's so called because in its strong position, it just looks like a very geometric isosceles triangle. In its unstrung position, it's like a sort of flattened W, and then you string it and it turns into a triangle, and then you draw it and it metamorphoses into the most beautiful perfect arc. It's a strangely magical

stick. But it's simple. Its lines are simple. Whereas the Scythian bow has the most convoluted curves and recurves and reflex and deflex. It's wiggling all over the place. It looks like an angry snake. So the technology to build that is so sophisticated. We're very lucky that we actually have, you know, original archaeological artefacts, obsidian bows, so we know exactly how they

were constructed. And they are this jigsaw puzzle. And so it's kind of curious that the most complicated type of bow was possibly the first, the most sophisticated type of bow was arguably the first of the family of composite bows. I should perhaps explain what we mean by a composite bow. So there are various tests. So do not confuse composite bow with compound bow. Compound bow is one of those ghastly modern contraptions with wheels on that allow you to hold it at full draw for about five minutes without straining. And dismiss that.

The composite bow is made of a composition of several different materials, as opposed to a self bow, like an English longbow, which is made of a single material, i.e. in that case, wood. So a composite bow begins, however, with wood. It has a wooden core, a wooden skeleton, if you will. Now, because it's going to have other materials, horn, sinew and glue attached to it, you are able to fashion that skeleton into a complex shape. So a soft bow, a wooden bow, like a long bow, is just not quite straight,

but just a gentle curve in one direction. Whereas a composite bow can exploit all sorts of mechanical advantages of geometry. So they joint, little fishtail joints, joining one piece to another, angling this and angling that. So you get these curly lines of composite bows. Obviously, if you drew that, it would break. But it's reinforced. It's reinforced, first of all, with horn. So usually the horn of the water buffalo, although in the case of the cilians, it may well have been Ibex horn. And in fact, using the Ibex horn may have been something that influenced that very curly shape.

The horn not only reinforces that, it's laminations of this horn glued glued onto this wooden skeleton not only does it reinforce the the um skeleton it gives it muscles it's like attaching muscles to your own skeleton because horn which is really pure carbon is very good at compression if you compress it so it's on the ins inside, what we call the belly of the bow, the bit that's facing the archer. And as the bow bends, that compresses, obviously, as you bend that bit towards you, it compresses. And horn is very good at resisting compression and storing the energy from that compression. So it's the muscle, it's the spring that drives the limbs back when you let go of the thing. But if you just worked with that, the thing would still be too fragile and might break. So just like an animal body like ours or a deer or a buffalo, the skeleton and the muscles are operated by tendons.

And so they use sinew to back the bow. Sinew is the tendon of an animal, you know, the hamstring of a deer or something like that and when you dry it and hammer it put the stone on on a rock hammer it out you get this very very fibrous material and you can pull it apart into fine strands and each one of those has the most extraordinary tensile strength you just can't pull a single strand apart with your hands so they layer layers and layers and layers of this sinew on the back of the bow. And all of this depends on the real secret technology of this, which is glue. It's a bow that is glued together. And it has to be a glue that will not only hold these different materials together

under tremendous forces, but also be pliant enough for the thing to be able to move and the glue not to crack. So it's a very, very sophisticated glue. And the best glue for the job comes from the swim bladders of the sturgeon, which, of course, is a fish of the Black Sea. So it was that glue technology that enabled the composite bow. So we have all these different materials glued together. They give you a very, very efficient bow. And by efficient, I mean the amount of power it takes, i.e. energy expended to pull it back to full draw, compared to the velocity of the arrow, because obviously the velocity of the arrow directly affects its impact value.

So with the composite bow, you have the spring potential of the different elements of it, the horn and the wood and the sinew. These all make for a very efficient spring and you have the geometry these pre-stressed shapes that basically return it to position faster a bow is a spring and a composite bow is a more efficient spring so you know for 50 kilos draw weight, you'll get more thump than you will for 50 kilos draw weight with a longbow. To get an equivalent thump from your arrow, you would have to shoot a wooden bow of a much higher draw weight. That's remarkable how such a complex, powerful bow was possibly one of the earliest bows made by the Sidians. It is mind-boggling. It really is. It's extraordinary.

Okay. And you see the cross-sections of them. I mean, this is not something one can do on radio, but they are the most intricate jigsaw pattern of little bits of horn and little bits of wood and the slice, the cross section. Well, there are pictures in my book, War Bows, and there's a chap in America, Jason Beaver, who makes the most beautiful replicas of obsidian bows, and in so doing has pricked a number of the myths so we've had a lot of misconceptions about them some of this came from their representation in art so we very often in art see the scythian bow represented as as quite small and this led people at one stage to think

oh well they must have had short arrows and just had a very short little sort of, you know, kid at the fair ping kind of draw. And they can't have had very much draw, you know, drawing. There must have been little toys really. Well, this doesn't make any military sense at all for one of the greatest warrior civilizations in history and we know the dimensions of real scythian bows because they have been found archaeologically um most famously at the yanghai cemetery in in china and stephen kopovitz made a exact copy of that bow uh and that was a powerful bow uh that over 100 pounds, I think. And there are other Scythian bows that have been found,

ones in a private collection, and, you know, they're over a metre tall. And the arrows that have been found with Scythian bows tend to be sort of 29 to 31 inches, and I'm sorry I can't do the metric conversion of that but it's contrary to this myth that scythian bows were tiny and lightweight and shot short arrows possibly one of the reasons of that myth is that there's a very iconic um little gold brooch in the British Museum with two scythians back to back and they've got these little tiny bows and it may simply be a function of the medium of the art that the

goldsmith was working in gold and to have made the limbs of the bows any longer they'd have just because they're so tiny so they'd have just broken and with a puff of wind. So it may be that kind of function. It may be that the bow is put there as an identifier. This chap's an archer. But the weapon is not more important than the man. It may be an artistic convention that the most important person in this representation is the archer. And we've given him a bow to tell you he's an archer,

but the bow's not the important bit. So's all many arguments which i can't possibly answer or give an opinion but but reasons why art may mislead at times but the reality is we do have archaeological finds of these bows and certainly jason beaver has been making many scythian bows, exact replicas, with exact same construction techniques in recent years, and he is pulling them to full draw, sort of 30 inches, 30, 31 inches, drawing behind the ear, so the bow will draw that far without snapping, and he's building them at snapping and he's building them at 120 130 pounds draw weight again i can't give you the metric equivalent of that but archers still tend to talk in pounds draw weight it's a mighty mighty bow wow and using that from horseback as well that is another issue is okay we can think that they the bow is capable of doing that. Would you be able

to use that weight of bow on horseback? Probably not, and certainly probably not without stirrups. So a number of things arising from that thought. One is, of course, the Scythians weren't exclusively horse archers. They did have infantry, and we see, you know, depictions of infantry. And they have other weapons, too. Conspicuously, they had a fairly long-handled pick that we see them fighting with and using with two hands. So, you know, they did have an amount of infantry. And they're very mobile, running around with their composite bows.

The other thought that comes from that is this idea of what kind of draw weight can you shoot from horseback? I cannot shoot a heavy bow. That's partly because I am now ancient and frail and partly because I have a broken scaphoid bone in my left wrist from a rebellious Turkish bow that turned inside out when i tried to string it one day and it broke that bone and apparently i'm too old to have it fixed but there we go um so i can't shoot heavy bows and i have great admiration for those who do but there are people who are shooting bows of phenomenal draw weight you know 140 160 there are a few people who have been able to shoot bows of 200 pounds draw weight. I mean, this is extraordinary. But I don't think they'd be able to do it from horseback.

When you see these people shooting these heavy bows, the technique they're using is very similar to the technique of somebody lifting heavy weights down at the gym. They stand in a position with their knees slightly bent and their pelvis tilted out. And you'll see this in medieval manuscripts. You look, the archers are standing there with their pelvises tilted out, just like a weightlifter at the gym. One of the things this does is it relieves the compression on your lower spine. But the other thing it does and and the flex needs is it recruits

all the muscles in the body from your toes to to to your biceps to lift that weight you're not you're not lifting a weight with your arms or just with your back or anything you're lifting it through your legs through your core through your back and everything that's the same for shooting a heavy bow. You need to be able to recruit all the muscles in the body. And that is what stirrups offer the archer on a horse. Because with stirrups, you can assume that weightlifter position, transferring the weight down into the balls of your feet on the stirrup and do that. And I think that was the most significant consequence of stirrups. There were others. It became less tiring for the horse. It became less tiring for a person on a long journey. But really, there's nothing you can do on a horse that you can't do without stirrups that you can do with other than shoot

heavier bows because of this ability to recruit all the muscles having said that you can shoot a bow without stirrups obviously in america the comanche and other native american tribes were famed for their horse archery and shooting bareback. And the Scythians, they didn't shoot bareback, but they didn't have stirrups. They had a particular type of saddle. It was the forerunner of the Parthian four-horn saddle that we spoke of earlier. And I made a replica of one of these. And what it has, it's just a pad saddle. replica of one of these and what it has it's just a pad saddle um and what it has is little padded bolsters at the front and back and i have galloped my horse and found that even without stirrups i

can lean forward with my thighs onto those bolsters and by so doing lift my seat from the back of the horse that gives me more stability in the shot because my knees are acting as shock absorbers and I can feel where they're going rather than being bounced by the horse and it gives you the optimum position to shoot you are getting into that pelvic tilt position to do that. You just can't recruit all the muscles because you have no platform for the lower leg. But from the knee up, you're still recruiting your whole body by swinging up into that position. You're engaging your core, you're engaging your quads, you're putting most of your body into the draw of the bow. So I think the Scythians would be able, and they would be young and strong, and that counts for a lot too.

So I'm sure they could shoot bows of between 80 and 100 pounds from their horses, but possibly not the sort of 120, 140-pound bows that perhaps some of the Qing archers in sort of 18th century China were able to do. And we have accounts of that, that they were able to do that. So it's this combination of around about a hundred pound Scythian bow and this iconic saddle that helps. Are they key components that make the Scythians such superlative horse archers? Yes, exactly that. They are components. And it was a number of things coming together at the same time. So it was this phenomenal technology of this powerful, relatively short bow, very suitable for use on a horse.

It was the saddle that enabled you to get into a position on the horse that was optimum for shooting a bow and supported you when when you went into the different positions you know one thing riding bareback but leaning forward to draw a bow and then twisting from the waist to shoot behind you they just gave you that little extra bit of support the saddle was also beneficial for the horse prior to that, a simple pad saddle is what it says, it's a pad. And you put a pad on a horse's back and you sit on it. Well, you get some cushioning, the horse gets a little bit of cushioning, but basically your weight is still bearing down on the vertebrae of its spine. One of the great things about the Scythian saddle is it had a sort of proto gullet.

In other words, it was two pads joined by a strip of leather. So the two pads sat either side of the spine. And so your seat and your inner thighs sat on this. So you weren't actually putting weight on the actual vertebrae it was it was just either side of it so that was greatly alleviating for the horse which gave you more start and enabled the horse to go faster and and and with more dash and panache it's a small thing but it was all part of a combination of things. And it was the fact that they were also, they carried swords and they carried spears and they were a versatile troop.

Indeed. You mentioned earlier, we talked about the Scythian bow and you mentioned how they had that iconic pick-like secondary weapon and various other melee weapons. What about the arrows that they shot from the bows? What do we know about Scythian arrows? Were they iconic in any way? Absolutely, they were. One of my favourite quotes from history is Ovid talking about the Sarmatians, who were really the successors to the Scythians, but Ovid was exiled and was hanging around. but was exiled and was hanging around. In the Black Sea area, he talked about the Salvation Horse archers and he described their arrows as yellow-nebbed and vile with venom. It's just wonderful.

And by yellow-nebbed, he means they had bronze points. So they had bronze-tipped and vial with venom as they were poisoned and of course Herodotus tells us that the Scythians used scythicon which was a poison and he gives great detail to how it was made I can't remember exactly but you can you kind of catch a few vipers and extract the venom from them but then you also let the vipers putrefy and you sort of mix them with urine and feces and various other disgusting things and you make a kind of a mash of it all and then tip the venom you've extracted into that and mix it all up so they did make use

of poison arrows and a great advantage of poison arrows is is that there's two advantages of poison arrows one is you win the psychological war before you've even engaged the enemy because as we all know you know you and i are having this chat at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and it's the disease poison those things that they're they're frightening foes because we don't know how to fight them most of us would rather get hand to hand with an enemy and so poison

it's a terrifying thing people say I don't mind being wounded but God's sake don't poison me a brave warrior will take an arrow shot but he doesn't want to be poisoned so you win a psychological war but you also have effect for less penetration it only needs to prick the skin um and and it's done the job um we see lots of different sydney and arrow heads

very often they have a little barb on them which of course is exactly what you need for a poison arrow, because they can't pull it out. It hangs in there to deliver its venom, like the bite of a snake. We see on some Scythian arrow shafts that have been discovered that they are painted and decorated. Obviously there's many reasons to paint and decorate them and high status warriors have always been keen on ornament and display. But the decorations with these kind of zigzag snake-like patterns, snake markings, patterns, make me wonder if the different colouring and

the different patterning on these arrows may have indicated different poisons or some arrows that were poisoned and some that were not poisoned that you could select from your quiver. Another interesting aspect of Scythian arrows is the fact that a lot of the arrowheads to be found are tiny. And this is one of the things that led to the idea that the Scythians must have had weak bows using little tiny arrows. As we've said, this makes no sense with the archaeological finds, nor does it make any military sense. So how could these tiny arrowheads be used? And the answer is probably with a foreshaft. So that is an arrow shaft that has a main shaft and then an extension for the last sort of 10 centimetres or so, 15 centimetres or so, that plugs in. The main shaft has to have a spine.

Spine's a term that archers use that really means whippiness. So you have to have the right sort of whippiness for the poundage of the bow you're using. If you've got a very heavy bow and the arrow's too bendy, too whippy, it'll kind of turn the corner as it comes out of the bow and wiggle. If the arrow is too stiff for a lightweight bow, again, it won't fly true. It's a very dynamic thing, an arrow flight, and it has to have a match. So you have to have the main shaft appropriate to the poundage of the bow. appropriate to the poundage of the bow. But you can put a little extension on the front of that, a foreshaft, and use this little tiny point.

This comes with a number of advantages. It comes with the advantage that retrieved arrows, there's a lot of work in an arrow, getting it straight, holding it over heat and straight, you know, bending it, holding it over heat and straightening the wood, shaving it down, making it perfectly cylindrical or barreled or shaped, carving the notch, the knock in the top, putting the feathers on, binding them on with sinew, a lot of work in an arrow. So any that could be retrieved, especially if they've hit the ground or if they're sticking in a horse or if they're sticking in an opponent when you go to retrieve them you'll almost certainly break the end off advantage with a foreshaft is you've still got the main bit and you only have to replace the

foreshaft another advantage is in terms of penetration you've got the weight and and the stiffness of the arrow for shooting but you've got a a thinner bit for penetrating so if you can get through whatever outer covering is there then you've got less resistance for the thing to needle its way into the target there is some evidence um there among the arrows that have been found, I've seen at least two that have a little spigot, a little dowel spigot on the end, which suggests that they are foreshafts that would plug into a hole in a main shaft so yes scythian arrows a lot of them used with poison on barbed arrow tips cast in bronze um a lot of them on four shafts plugged into arrows arrows possibly color-coded to say which are poisoned or what the poison is uh again hugely sophisticated You took the words right out of my mouth just then. Stingrays, vipers, the step horse, they're really using exotic animals, maybe,

to say, to create these arrows, to create this bow. And all these things together, as you say, the components they form, they explain why the Scythians become such great horse archers absolutely and as you said they're drawing this all from the natural world um I think they observe the natural world keenly and you know and we're in touch with it in a way that we no longer are um finally then you did mention earlier just a a bit earlier, the Sarmatians and

how they were successors to the Scythians. Obviously the Scythians don't last forever. What does happen to Scythian horse archery and that way of warfare? Does it continue? Very much so. Everywhere the Scythians went, we have our horse archery cultures. I don't think we can absolutely say that the cityans took it there i think it may have developed independently in a lot of these places as well um but yeah it is the the universal elite style of warfare in the near east and the east it's ubiquitous yeah so in the steps and the near east It's ubiquitous. Yeah, so in the steppes and the Near East, that's where it's like the noble way of the warrior.

Well, and in China and in the Far East. Wow. And the samurai, the risk of doing too much plugging of a book, but in my book, War Bows, there is a whole section on the Yumi, the Japanese bow, and everybody thinks of the samurai and the katana and the swordsmanship and all the modern fashionable martial arts that come out of that.

But in the age before 1603, samurai warfare was horse archery. Samurai were first and foremost horse archers. Samurai battles were horse archery battles. The sword was a sidearm. And the Chinese, the Tang dynasty, the Ming dynasty, in China it stayed longer and later than anywhere else in the Qing dynasty. You know, we're going into the early 19th century and the Qing, although they had matchlock muskets, the elite troops are still horse archers. Wow.

That was partly an identity thing. The Manchu, you know, came from a horse archery culture and it was part of them projecting their ancestral identity. But the Qing period in China placed tremendous emphasis not just on horse archery but on archery in general. And one of my favorite things about them of course is they did also have ice skating archers that they deployed along the frozen rivers in winter. No way. Yes, that's using that same idea of fluidity and movement and getting to an enemy quickly and striking a trouble spot. That's amazing.

And you're telling me then that these Hollywood images that we're getting today with the katana-wielding samurai and all that, that's not completely true. It is not completely true. I mean, it's not without truth. I mean, the katana was a highly important weapon and was used, but the samurai stopped fighting in 1603.

Battle of Sekigahara, 1603, and then you get the Tokugawa shogunate and it closes itself off to the world and becomes introspective and reflective and that's why it develops a stylized form shogunate and it closes itself off to the world and becomes introspective and reflective and that's why it develops a stylized form of all its martial arts there but up until then and particularly in the early 13th and 14th and 15th centuries the samurai were horse archers that's what they were the primary martial art was horse archery, as it was in China, as it was in Iran, as it was

in Mughal India, as it was in the Arab world, as it was in the Ottoman world. Wow, that's remarkable. It's a massive, massive culture. More of the world, more of the Northern Hemisphere did it than didn't. In a strange way, the half dozen countries of Western Europe that stuck with the longbow are really the minority. And it was a class thing. It was just a different class of warrior. It was used as archers in the West as they were in the East.

Well, fortunately for our listeners who want to learn more about war bows they have the perfect book to go and read which is mike it's called war bows it's a lovely publication and it has um a full section on the english longbow and lots to say about that has a full section on the crossbow which is a very underrated and overlooked but very important weapon, and a big section on the composite bow and a big section on the Japanese bow. One of the reasons I enjoyed writing that book so much was what I love about history is when we get into comparative study. And we can have an interest in a thing like for me

archery and and it it it's a travel guide that takes you all over the world to all these different cultures and it's full of surprises that is absolutely true dudes we've got to get you back on for one on the uh ancient crossbow i'm absolutely sure mike loads thank you so much for coming on the podcast thank Thank you, Tristan. Absolutely my pleasure.