Tag: archery

Archery is the art, practice, or skill of shooting arrows with the use of a bow, from Latin arcus. A person who participates in archery is typically known as an archer.

While archery has been historically used for hunting, both for food and later, in a use that survives to this day, also as a sport, through most of pre-gunpowder human history its main use was for combat; archers were extremely important in warfare, in open field and siege alike, due to their ability to massively kill enemy armies with literal rains of arrows and to set things aflame with burning arrowheads. Proper easy of burning arrowheads could destroy the morale of an invading infantry division or set the entire defending fortress on fire, while non-burning arrowheads could destroy a large portion of the enemy infantry before it could even enter melee combat. Such was the destruction ability of archers that horse archers were the backbone of the both the Hun and Mongol hordes; the former brought terror to and helped the eventual demise of the Roman Empire, while the latter conquered such a large portion of Eurasia that historians coined the term Pax Mongolica (paralleling the Pax Romana) to describe their empire that at its apex spanned from modern-day Poland to the Middle East to Southern China, Korea and the southern parts of Russia.

With the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of firearms, archery was quickly rendered obsolete in warfare. Early firearms were not good in comparison to good archers, with drawbacks such as a vastly inferior rate of fire and high susceptibility to wet weather; nevertheless, they had longer effective range and, most importantly, required almost no practice to use properly in comparison to the many years that it took to train an archer; indeed, a popular saying used to go that "to make a good archer, one must start with his grandfather". Nevertheless, in the Far East archery is to this day considered an important subject in the studies of martial arts, and some Japanese schools have archery dojos ran by archery clubs. Additionally, archery saw an 18th century reemergence as a recreational activity in the West, becoming relevant as an elite class sport, specially for hunting but also at non-living targets, and eventually also becoming an Olympic competition.