I saw a program about the ancient Huns who used composite bows of horn with a wood core. They were short recurve looking things. They talked about 12 year old kids killing stags and such from horse back at 80 yards. How did these people practice? or were they just lucky? They had very strong well built equipment ( 80-120# bows). I saw the program on the history channel I think a few years back.

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I doubt they had time to practice. It was probably due more to them growing up with bows in their hands and shooting arrows from horseback being part of their way of life. The ones who were bad shots probably didn't live long.

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At least as far back as the Scythians, these people hunted and fought with bows and arrows. Whether Huns, Magyars, Mongols or Turks, they came from the region of the Altai mountains, where their ancestors were buried in great mounds, following their flocks into the grass seas of the Asian Steppes.

They were herders and riders of horses so the materials for making bows were readily at hand, the long horse sinews for the backs and the horns of goats or sheep for the bellies. The wood didn't matter so much, it was just something to glue the sinew and horn to and carve the ears that held the large string loops at efficient angles to store the energy of the archer's muscles, silk string probably traded from the Chinese or other town dwellers or gathered in the wild.

They learned to shoot early from horseback, the trick being to ride well. A good rider could shoot better than a bad one even if the bad one was a better shot when standing on the ground. They practiced by shooting into their own horses' footprints or at isolated trees or mounds probably from great distances.

They could fling short arrows with barbed heads hundreds of yards well enough to hit a horse and do more damage than if they had hit the rider. At shorter range they used longer arrows with armour piercing heads or more specialized heads for cutting the lacings of the armour. As elsewhere, there was always this competition between the armourers and bowyers but in time the warriors discovered that loose silk over heavy quilted vests worked as well as anything.

For hunting, they used broadheads as we do now, but it was probably mostly for sport or to augment the meat taken from their domesticated flocks. They were reputed to be able to subsist on the blood and milk of their mounts. Perhaps hunting was for them practice for war as well, war that defended the grazing lands and later was put to use to enforce tribute from the town dwellers who provided what the people did not make for themselves.

This very old horse, flock and bow culture survived for thousands of years but now, like many indigenous cultures, it is dying, confined to &quot;reservations&quot; of sorts. Probably no one has made a Turkish bow in the old way for at least two centuries, although there is apparently some interest recently in constructing replicas from more modern materials with techniques that take far less time to complete the bows. Still there is something to learned from these replicas about how the bows performed, and you can get some appreciation of the elegant efficiency of the bows and understand why they persisted so long in use, far longer than the English longbow.

And maybe you can appreciate the amazing technology that produced them, that was every bit as sophisticated as the longbow technology that made use of the heartwood under compression and the sapwood under tension. The horn was much stronger in compression, naturally because that is what horn is for, and the sinew, likewise, was stronger under tension, naturally because that is what sinew is for. Unlike the modern contrivances that utilize pulleys and exotic metals to force things, and frequently come loosen or even come apart, these bows relied on an understanding of the nature of things, what things did best in balance with other things, things readily available to pre-industrial cultures.

Maybe an appreciation of the bows will lead to an appreciation of the people who once made them and whose descendents survive somewhere on the Steppes of Asia, overwhelmed by the force of modern, globalized technologies, the same technologies that have overwhelmed modern archery and caused a few people to seek out the old ways, in this forum and elsewhere, that are more in balance with the world.