Fireside this week! First off, it seems like last week\u2019s post on the Hollywood myth of archery volley fire really got out there, so if you are a new reader just joining us, welcome! If you are in to discussions of historical tactics with an eye towards correcting common myths in games and film, you might consider also reading the three(ish)-part series on \u201cTotal Generalship\u201d (I<\/a>, II<\/a>, IIIa<\/a>, IIIb<\/a>, IIIc<\/a>), which discussed how pre-modern generals could \u2013 and couldn\u2019t \u2013 actually command an army in battle, or our series on pre-railroad logistics (I<\/a>, II<\/a>, III<\/a>), discussing how ancient and medieval armies managed marching and eating on campaign.<\/p>\n For this week\u2019s musing<\/strong>, I wanted to expand a little bit on an element of last week\u2019s archery post that I gestured at but didn\u2019t really get into, which is the question of cultures with bow traditions, but with meaningfully weaker bows. You will recall that a lot of the math on arrow penetration, range and lethality we were working with came from this older post<\/a> of mine, which took as its starting point the shooting characteristics of the English longbow and the Steppe composite bow, historically the strongest war bows used. In practice, my sense is that in much of Eurasia, by the Middle Ages at least, most cultures with strong archery traditions were using war bows in that range.<\/p>\n But what about the exceptions?<\/p>\n Here there are two that spring to mind. The first <\/strong>is that it\u2019s not clear that ancient<\/em> composite recurve bows had the same very high draw weights: Sean Manning has collected the \u2013 admittedly sometimes sparse \u2013 evidence in a pair of his posts<\/a>, which are also going to be in this week\u2019s reading recommendations below. The suggestion<\/em> we might glean from the evidence \u2013 and it is only a suggestion, given how thin it is \u2013 is that war bows seem to have developed heavier draws over time, with late Bronze and very early iron age bows being reconstructed with draw-weights in the 40-65lbs range, while by the fifth century or so the draw weights push more confidently into the 60-70lbs range. Second<\/strong>, I have seen it generally supposed, that the war bows in use in the Americas were also not as powerful as English longbows or Steppe composite bows, although I can\u2019t put a number to how much less powerful.<\/p>\n We might wonder first why that might be and then what that might mean for our understanding of archery tactics. For the why<\/em> we are necessarily speculating, but I think the most immediately plausible answer is the tactical and especially armor environment. As Manning notes himself, ancient military treatises that talk about archery often stress rate of \u2018fire\u2019 as being as important as raw power and of course the speed of shooting over an extended period is going to be fairly closely connected to the strength required to pull the bow. In short, there are tradeoffs<\/em> for powerful war bows<\/strong>: \u2018heavy\u2019 war bows (in terms of draw-weight) require \u2018heavy\u2019 (literally) arrows that can withstand the force of acceleration and more strength and endurance to shoot. So if fighting is happening in an environment where you do not need<\/em> that power, there would be advantages to \u2018lighter\u2019 (in draw-weight) bows.<\/p>\n And here it is worth noting that in early Iron Age (c. 1200-500 BC in the Eastern Mediterranean is the range I mean with \u2018early\u2019), armor of any<\/em> description seems like it might have been a fair bit rarer than it would be in subsequent centuries. The evidence for the armor of regular warriors in the Bronze Age \u2013 only chieftains and kings would have worn something like the Dendra Panoply \u2013 is extremely limited<\/em> but also suggests, to me at least, that most soldiers had at most a textile defense, if anything<\/em>. Egyptian infantry in the Bronze Age, for instance, are \u2013 so far as I have seen \u2013 almost always depicted as wearing knee-length loincloths, but no helmets and bare chests (and carrying shields). The picture in the pre-contact Americas is a bit more complex \u2013 the Americas were really big \u2013 but armor was limited to organic materials (as there was no tool metal use prior to contact), which is to say the best available armor might have been in the same basic performance class as a gambeson or buff leather<\/a>.<\/p>\n And that makes a big<\/em> difference: you will recall, working very roughly from Alan Williams testing in The Knight and the Blast Furnace<\/em> (2003), lethal penetration of an unarmored human requires relatively little energy, on the order of 10-30J (generally to the lower end of that range). Adding a thick textile defense might raise the impact energy required up to something on the order of 40-60J (very roughly). An mail with padding or a solid breastplate in iron or bronze might push that figure up considerably and so on. You can see my rough estimates in the chart below:<\/p>\n So in a high or late medieval environment, where a lot<\/em> of combatants on the battlefield \u2013 not just in Europe, but in the Middle East, South Asia or East Asia \u2013 are going to be wearing some mix of textile, hardened leather and metal armor, it makes a lot of sense that bows push their impact energies up as high as they can by maximizing draw-weight. In essence, they are \u2018keeping pace\u2019 with accelerating armor technology.<\/p>\n By contrast, as I\u2019ve argued elsewhere<\/a>, the Romans deploying a nearly-all-metal-armored heavy infantry battle line in the second century BC was an innovation<\/em>. Ancient armies were almost never so heavily or uniformly armored. Even as late as the Hellenistic period, we see reportedly unarmored<\/em> soldiers (with shields, of course) \u2013 lighter Greek thureophoroi<\/em>, Gallic, Celtiberian and Iberian warriors, etc. \u2013 used as \u2018line infantry\u2019 holding the line of battle (rather than fighting as skirmishers). In that context, it\u2019s not hard to see why a relatively moderate draw-weight, allowing fore more rapid or prolonged shooting, would be advantageous, especially given that functionally no amount of draw-weight would allow an archer to defeat the real key protection these combatants had against arrows: their shields.<\/p>\n But does that combat environment, with lower draw-weight bows combined with much lighter armor, change our expectations for archer lethality? I don\u2019t think it really does, actually. From a pure model-perspective, we\u2019re still dealing with infantry that generally use pretty big shields<\/em>, so body coverage is still very high, meaning even most \u2018on target\u2019 arrows won\u2019t inflict wounds. But also, we know that Greek hoplite phalanxes, Macedonian sarisa<\/em>-phalanxes, Roman legions, Gallic battle lines and so on confidently marched into contact against arrow-heavy forces all the time: the exception were horse archers who could, of course, withdraw faster than a shield-bearing heavy infantry formation could advance.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in much of Native North America, what we see through the limited pre-contact and early post-contact evidence is a fairly normal \u2018first system<\/a>\u2018 interaction, where \u2018battles\u2019 consist of often prolonged exchanges of missiles (arrows, javelins, sling shot) that produce very low casualties<\/em>. These sorts of low-lethality battles, as Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization<\/a><\/em> show up in a lot of cultures. Some of those cultures develop armor specifically for those contexts, but many do not and casualties remain low because the exchanges happen at long distance, often from behind shields, in loose order. The long range makes arrow \u2018dodging,\u2019 feasible, while the shields and loose order mean that a very high percentage of missiles are simply not going to hit anyone. Instead, the extremely high casualty rates of first system warfare come from raids and ambushes, where weapons (both contact and missile weapons) are being used at very close range against enemies who have little hope of defending themselves. Of course that is also a military context where a \u2018heavy\u2019 draw bow doesn\u2019t offer much advantage: it isn\u2019t going to be appreciably more lethal against an opponent hiding behind a shield or a tree (nor more lethal against an opponent being ambushed at close range), but it will be much more exhausting to use and shoot slower.<\/p>\n In short, then, I find the basic supposition \u2013 supported, as far as I know, by the evidence \u2013 that draw-weights on bows were lighter in Eurasian antiquity and in the New World quite plausible. It fits with the broader threat environment those bows were operating in that whatever small advantage of lethality might be offered was outweighed by the loss of shooting speed in a low-armor environment. At the same time, that interaction doesn\u2019t seem to have really changed the arrow lethality situation, because shields<\/em> and dispersion<\/em> were still very effective ways to limit the lethality of archery.<\/p>\n On to Recommendations<\/strong>:<\/p>\n Of course since I\u2019ve mentioned it above, let\u2019s start with Sean Meanning\u2019s two-part series on bow draw-weights, discussing the archaeological and reconstruction evidence first from the Medieval period (in the first part<\/a>) and then from the ancient world (in the second part<\/a>). Sean\u2019s blog, Book and Sword<\/em> also just generally has a lot of very good ancient warfare material in the back catalog, so give that a look if that is your jam. Sean is an academic expert on ancient warfare (particularly for the Achaemenids, a field that is grossly understudied) with a PhD from the Universit\u00e4t Innsbruck; he will not steer you wrong.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, if you like watching historians comment on the historical context and mistakes of battle scenes in movies, Insider has put together a massive, three hour long<\/em> supercut of their videos<\/a> interviewing historians over just that, featuring appearances from friends-of-the-blog Michael Taylor and Roel Konijnendijk, as well as Michael Fulton, Evan Wilson and William Short.<\/p>\n And for more on what is happening in the study of the ancient world, also check out the May 1 issue of Pasts Imperfect<\/em><\/a>, with a focus on Seth Bernard\u2019s recent work estimating the economic role of enslaved laborers in Pompeii, as well as noting a fascinating comparative study of inequality <\/a>between the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty by Guido Alfani, Michele Boll and Walter Scheidel. This latest Pasts Imperfect<\/em> also includes a gift\/author link (which I\u2019m not sure I can reproduce) to the \u2018big splash\u2019 ancient history article of the month, \u201cPunic people were genetically diverse with almost no Levantine ancestors.\u201d That\u2019s not precisely a new<\/em> hypothesis (as PI notes, Josephine Quinn argued for it back in 2017), but it is exciting to see it appear so clearly in the genetic evidence. We\u2019ll be coming back to Carthage a bit later this year on the blog, but this sort of evidence certainly forces us to rethink the nature of Carthaginian imperialism in the western Mediterranean.<\/p>\n Finally, I suppose I ought to note that I wrote again for Foreign Policy<\/em>, this time on the role that pro-trade policies \u2013 despite elite disdain of merchants \u2013 played in Roman success<\/a>. Alas, this one is presumably behind the paywall, but for those with access, it may interest.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/PXL_20250508_215629352.webp?resize=842%2C634&ssl=1\")
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I should note since there remains some online contretemps over it, that Emily Armstrong, the new lead singer, was spectacular live. Chester Bennington will never be replaced, but Armstrong absolutely has the chops to fill the role going forward.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n