A Short History of the Recurve Bow

Nobody invented the recurve bow on a particular day, so any honest recurve bow history starts without a single date or inventor. The shape, with limb tips that curve away from the archer, grew up alongside composite bows of horn, wood and sinew, which a 2025 academic review places in the Late Bronze Age. Even that dating is still argued over.

Ancient composite bows: an approximate, disputed start

A recurve's tips bend away from the archer when the bow is strung. A composite bow is built from layers of different materials, classically horn, wood and sinew. A bow can be one without the other.

In a 2025 paper in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Gabriel Šaffa notes that "prevailing theories" put its origin in the fourth millennium BCE. He reads the supposed early examples as simple self bows and concludes that the full composite bow "was a Late Bronze Age innovation, likely emerging in the first half of the second millennium BCE". In his reading it appeared once, "probably in the Near East", and spread quickly across Eurasia. That is one scholar's reassessment, not settled fact, so every early date here is approximate.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds two sections of an Egyptian composite bow, catalogued as European white birch and horn and dated to about 1550–1295 BCE.

Šaffa credits Indo-Iranian peoples with developing the technology further, "culminating in the emergence of the distinctive Scythian design by the fourth century BCE". Popular claims of a Scythian, Assyrian or Central Asian "invention" date conflict with one another.

Turkish bows: the form refined

Later Turkish bows show how far the form was taken. The Met's "Composite Bow with Forty Arrows" is dated AH 1132 (1719–20 CE) and listed as horn, wood, sinew, lacquer and decorative materials, with a recorded length of 64.8 cm (25½ in) and a weight of 365 g. Photographed unstrung, its limbs curl forward into a deep C.

The Met also holds a 17th–18th-century Ottoman bow of wood, sinew, horn and gold, which it catalogues as a "reflex bow". Museums do not always use the word recurve.

Fred Bear and laminated limbs

In the modern story, Bear Archery says Fred Bear founded the company in 1933 and credits him with "the first fiberglass take-down bow", which is the company's own account.

The company's Grizzly recurve shows the construction that replaced horn and sinew. Bear says the Grizzly has been "proving itself since 1950" and that "Mr. Bear made the last design change to the Grizzly in 1964." Today's version has a hard-rock maple riser and limbs of "clear maple backed and faced with high strength black fiberglass".

The Olympic recurve

World Archery states: "Recurve has been the bowstyle used at the Olympic Games since archery's reintroduction to the programme in 1972."

It describes "laminated carbon fibre and carbon foam in the limbs", notes that some makers still use bamboo, and says the riser "is often made of aluminium or carbon fibre". An Olympic recurve also carries a sight, stabilisers that "help to balance the bow and reduce vibration", and a clicker, "a device that checks the draw length". Our longbow vs recurve comparison explains how today's recurves differ from straight-limbed bows.

Recurve bow timeline

If you want to read further, you can browse archery history books on Amazon. Look for titles that cite museum collections and archaeological finds. Want to shoot one? Start with our guide to choosing your first recurve bow.

Frequently asked questions

When was the recurve bow invented?

No one knows exactly. Gabriel Šaffa's 2025 review dates the full horn, wood and sinew composite bow to roughly the first half of the second millennium BCE; older theories reach back to the fourth millennium BCE. Any single year quoted online is a guess.

Who invented the recurve bow?

No individual. Šaffa argues the full composite bow arose once, probably in the Near East, and spread across Eurasia. Fred Bear is the best-known modern name, but Bear Archery credits him with the first fiberglass take-down bow, not with inventing the recurve shape.

Is a recurve bow the same as a composite bow?

No. Composite refers to construction from layers such as horn, wood and sinew; recurve refers to tips that curve away from the archer. The Met's Turkish bow is both. A modern Olympic recurve, with the carbon and foam limbs World Archery describes, is a recurve but not a horn composite.