Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of ancient warfare answers with me, Murray, your weekly

break from the real world so that I can talk to you, answer one of your questions, hopefully,

about something that interests you in the ancient world of, or in the world of ancient warfare,

in the ancient world of warfare.

Nice.

Anyway, so today's question comes from Jan, I think, Jan Willem.

Jan, I'm not sure if that's a hyphenated name.

Jan, I'm going to say Jan.

And you, of course, can ask us a question too.

You can answer in the email. Have I said that already? I might be getting confused. Anyway, you can of course back us on Patreon at one of three levels, Legionary Optio or Centurion. Jan asks, I hope it is okay for me to ask a question on another subject in the comments of this

video. Yes, it is. My question is what do we really know about ancient mast archery? How was it

conducted? We may envision Hollywood-style showers of arrows raining down accurately on a target,

but how realistic is this? Having done some archery myself although many years ago the main

challenge for me is getting the distance right and with the unit of archers several ranks deep

i wonder how those not in the front rank would be able to do that while having poor sights on the

target as the men in front of them obstruct their view. Right. Okay, so probably some controversial stuff

coming up when it comes to archery, and I'm sure any arches in the viewers and readers and

listeners will be leaping on me. Now, you make some very good points about volley fire. We don't

know about ancient volley fire. What we know is some comments about arrows

blotting out the sun at the Battle of the Maupoli at the Battle of Marathon and others.

We have all the way through to Ariens, I.Taxus in the mid-130s AD talking about the fact that

he wanted to defeat the Allen cavalry

...