Defensive Armor of the Han Period 225 



archers in shooting with them. An order was issued by him to the 

 effect that all his men, at whatever goal he should discharge a sounding 



begging the question to speak in this case of an invention of Moduk, or of a Hunnic 

 invention, or of invention at all; for such a contrivance is not an invention creditable 

 to an individual or a single tribe. It represents the result of a gradual finding and 

 experimenting, the how, when, and where of which is lost. All we may safely assert 

 is that chronologically we first meet these buzzing arrows among the Huns, — and 

 the text of the Shi ki contains the oldest record of them, — and that numerous archae- 

 ological finds made in central and western Siberia testify to the fact that this type of 

 arrow was formerly generally diffused among the Turkish stock of peoples (compare 

 B. Adler, Pfeifende Pfeile und Pfeilspitzen in Sibirien, Globus, Vol. 81, 1902, 

 pp. 94-96; this brief notice is purely descriptive, without an historical point of view). 

 Moduk did not invent the sounding arrow, which surely existed before his time, and 

 which was used by his countrymen for hunting purposes; but he turned it to a novel 

 use by availing himself of the whizzing noise as a signal for a cavalry attack. With 

 this specific end in view he had such arrows "made, " as the Chinese text says, which 

 implies that they were previously known. Hirth (/. c, p. 254, note) has justly 

 doubted whether Moduk may be regarded as the "inventor" of the sounding arrow, 

 since a similar expression (hao shi, No. 3872, "sounding arrows, discharged by bandits 

 as a signal to begin the attack") is metaphorically employed by the philosopher 

 Chuang-tse of the fourth century B.C. But the ming ti of Moduk must have been 

 affairs somewhat different from the latter, otherwise we should not have the two dif- 

 ferent terms. There are indeed (and the ethnographical point of view should never 

 be neglected) diverse types of sounding arrows in our collections. An arrow can be 

 made "sounding " by merely having one or several perforations in the iron blade; and 

 the humming is essentially intensified by a special whistling apparatus inserted be- 

 tween shaft and head. This device is an oval-shaped knob of wood or bone, perforat- 

 ed like a whistle with two, four, or more holes, on which the wind plays when the arrow 

 sharply cuts the air. I venture to presume that the sounding arrow mentioned by 

 Chuang-tse belonged to the first of these types, and that of Moduk to the second; 

 the interpretation given by Ying Shao (Shi ki, Ch. no, p. 3 b) of the term ming ti 

 leaves no doubt as to this fact. Again in the Chinese Annals we hear of sounding 

 arrows being in the possession of the T'u-kue or Turks (for instance, Chou shu, 

 Ch. 50, p. 3; Pei shi, Ch. 99, p. 2; and Julien, Documents historiques sur les Tou- 

 kioue, p. 9). A new term appears in the Annals of the T'ang Dynasty (T'ang shu, 

 Ch. 39, p. 9), — hiao arrows (hiao shi). The word hiao, not listed in any of our dic- 

 tionaries, is written with a character composed of the classifier 'bone' (ku) and the 

 phonetic element hiao ('filial piety'). This reading is indicated in the Glossary of 

 the T'ang Annals (Ch. 4, p. 2 b) where the word is explained by the older term ming 

 ti ("sounding arrow"). The manner of writing the word indicates that the question 

 is here of arrows with a whistling contrivance carved from bone. These arrows, 

 according to T'ang shu, were sent as tribute from the district Kuei-ch'uan in Kuei 

 chou, now the prefecture of Suan-hua in Chi-li Province (Playfair, Cities and Towns 

 of China, 2d ed., No. 7363). Sounding bone arrows, accordingly, were made and 

 used in China during the T'ang period; and in coming to Japan, we need not invoke 

 the Huns, but are confronted with the plain fact of an idea directly imported from 

 China. The Kojiki of 712 a.d. (B. H. Chamberlain's translation, p. 72) relates 

 that "the Impetuous-Male-Deity shot a whizzing barb into the middle of a large 

 moor, and sent him [the Great Deity] to fetch the arrow, and when he had entered 

 the moor, at once set fire to the moor all round." The text employs the same charac- 

 ters for the word as Shi ki and Ts'ien Han shu (Ch. 94 A, p. 2 b: ming ti), but they 

 receive the Japanese reading nari-kabura (literally, ' singing turnip '). Chamberlain, 

 in the introduction to his translation of the Kojiki (p. lxix), justly emphasizes that 

 this peculiar kind of arrow belongs to the traces of Chinese influence on the material 

 culture of old Japan (Japanese illustrations in Ph. F. v. Siebold, Nippon, 2d ed., 

 Vol. I, p. 342, and G. Mueller-Beeck, Mitteilungen der deutschen Ges. Ostasiens, 

 Vol. IV, p. 3, Plates 5 and 6). In the Nihongi of 720, a sounding arrow with eight 

 eyes or holes is mentioned (Aston, Nihongi, Vol. I, p. 87; K. Florenz, Japanische 

 Mythologie, p. 206). Reverting to China, we have for the Mongol period Rubruck's 

 account to the effect that Mangu made a very strong bow which two men could 



