In the modern urban world, they are an essential part of the landscape on signposts for roads and paths. As a directional marker, it has been around for millennia. As one of the first pieces of technology – and one of the simplest to understand – it was an essential part of communication.Īn arrow as depicted in two dimensions has a pointy end and a fletched end, which implies movement.

A crucial element of the stories humans tell themselves.Įarly in history, the arrow developed an effective and quite separate symbolic existence from the bow. The cave paintings of Iberia might have been the first – but not the last time – that the arrow would become a metaphorical tool. This would make bows and arrows some of the earliest symbols that represent ideas larger than themselves. (Intriguingly aligning with the competition visualisation techniques elite archers use to prepare for events.) A common explanation is that they represented a form of ritual magic – and that visualising a successful hunt would make a real on more likely to happen. Many have speculated why these images were drawn, given that cave paintings usually represent animals. In Villafranca, also in eastern Spain, an ancient painting depicts an archer with a drawn bow holding a sheaf of arrows in his bow hand, a sight familiar to modern traditional archers. The images in this cave are some of the first depictions of humans in art. The simple stick figures, clearly in motion, give us a sense of the scene and we can even understand the direction of the arrows from just a few marks on the wall.Įven though it was drawn potentially 7000 years ago, we understand the metaphor of the drawn bow while other, more abstract, images made in the same period are more difficult to decipher. Etched on a wall of the Cova dels Cavalls rock art site in eastern Spain there is a prehistoric image of archers hunting deer.

Bow quiver of arrows drawing art