weapon, the crossbow, which appeared in the late Spring and Autumn
period.^9 The crossbow was slower than the bow but easier for less trained
troops to use, and it had greater penetrating power. But infantry archers
did not require the addition of the crossbow to outshoot the chariot
archers. In the Mediterranean world, the Mycenean chariot-riding aristo-
crats were defeated by the massed infantry of the“Sea Peoples,”though
the exact course of that defeat is unknown.
Disciplined, massed infantry could have rendered the chariot ineffective
regardless of changes in archery. The crossbow was not a revolutionary
weapon; it may well have been that the growing size and improved com-
mand and control of the infantryfinally allowed the mass of commoner
soldiers to defeat the aristocrats. This changing military environment was
profoundly disturbing to the political and social order. The aristocratic
archer was no longer the master of the battlefield. His martial mastery
disappeared, or was rendered moot, by new forms of combat. The great
flourishing of thought in the Warring States period was partly caused by
the tumultuous changes in almost every area of life. And while the cross-
bow trigger mechanism would become its own metaphor for timing and
holding force in abeyance for a devastating strike, the elites turned to the
memory of archery as an aristocratic pursuit for reassurance.
The aristocrats of the Zhou dynasty practiced extremely formal archery
ceremonies. From the descriptions in theRecord of Ritual, the major test
for the participants was their deportment, not their accuracy. Interestingly,
like other major rituals, music played an important part, in some sense
connecting this ceremony to martial dances. The participants were paired
according to seniority and ability. Although charioteering and wrestling
contests were also regular parts of the Zhou performance events, archery
was used to rank the participants for court posts. The goal in this formal
setting was not military effectiveness. As Confucius described it:
The Master said,“It is said,‘In archery, one does not emphasize piercing the hide of
the target, because people’s strengths differ.’Such is the ancient Way.”^10
Here Confucius is detaching the function of archery in battle or hunting
from its performance as simply a performance. This passage was later
explained by Zhu Xi ( 1130 – 1200 ce) to indicate that archery contests
were used to measure virtue:
The ancients engaged in archery in order to observe a person’s virtue, and therefore
were concerned with hitting the center of the target rather than piercing its hide....
[T]he saying in theRecord of Ritual,“After King Wu defeated the Shang, he
demobilized his troops and held an archery contest outside the city walls, and the
Archery and Archery Contests 39