Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 166 h David Nicolle 10–11. The wooden cores of the bows are, of course, tapered towards their tips and where these are particularly damaged the surrounding sinew has peeled away (photo 10). In one instance, however, the sinew has retained its shape, leaving a hole into which a separate bow-tip may originally have been inserted. Such shaped bow tips have been found in Central and Inner Asia, and in Siberia. There climatic conditions allowed the survival of substantially more organic material, though in most cases the carved bow tips were of bone. (Author’s photograph; reportedly now in the National Museum store, Doha, Qatar). 12–13. As far as I am aware, no carved bone bow tips have been found in a medieval Islamic archaeological context. However, this small wooden object was found in another remarkable hoard of military equipment in the Citadel of Damascus (in location CD5). The context and by far the greater part of the finds clearly dated from the late Mamlūk period, perhaps also just extending into the first decades of Ottoman rule in Syria (mid-15th to early 16th centuries). This curiously shaped piece of wood might be part of a broken wooden bow tip, with the notch having originally taken the bowstring, though this interpretation remains tentative. (Syrian Department of Antiquities, Damascus; IFPO and author’s photographs).