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A short time later, Egypt went to war with Persia, then a mighty power, and the Persian warriors, using only sling-shots and javelins, were almost annihilated by the arrows fired by the Egyptians from distances where they were safe from the javelins of the Persians. Egypt quickly conquered Persia and immediately warred successfully on other nations before any of them could train troops in archery. The bow and arrow made Egypt a victorious nation after years of being Persia's puppet.

Very quickly thereafter other nations discarded the sling-shot and javelin and developed their own archers, and the bow and arrow was the major weapon in warfare for centuries before the dawn of the Christian Era and for approximately 1,600 years thereafter.

If an arrow did not immediately kill its victim through those 3,000 odd years of countless battles, it usually meant death if the warrior were struck in the upper body or head. Surgery was practically unknown, and even if it had been developed to the high science of today, the life of the stricken man hardly could have been saved because modern surgeons regard the extraction of an arrow from a human body as an almost fatal operation.

It was the custom, when an army had been victorious, for the able warriors to move over the battlefield and-as an act of mercy-to slit the throats of comrades whose bodies had been pierced by an arrow. The stricken soldiers of the defeated army usually were left where they fell to die slowly from loss of blood, from thirst or from gangrene.

The original Egyptian bow was from 4'h to 5 feet tall, and the arrows were from 24 to 32 inches in length, tipped with bronze. In countries where bronze was not available, stone, or flint, was used, while in others the wooden tip was sharpened to a fine point. Some authorities credit the Greeks with using a bow made of a composition of wood, horn and sinew. When unstrung, it took the form of a letter "C." It was a bow of this type that Ulysses, the jealous one, used to shoot his wife's admirers.

Frederick W. Kasch, former Director of Physical Education at the University of Illinois, offered the conclusion, based on research, that the Turks, not the Greeks, pioneered the use of the "C" bow, which bow was very short.

Experiments developed that the longer the bow, the greater the firing range, and as time went on the standard bow became 6 feet in height. The cross-bow, a devastating weapon, followed, and its greatest success was in the various wars that rent Europe for hundreds of years.