Extremely RARE ancient Islamic Bronze Archer’s Thumb Ring c1,000 years old KUFIC inscription

Extremely RARE ancient Islamic Bronze Archer’s Thumb Ring c1,000 years old KUFIC inscription

This is a very unusual large and rare type of bronze archer’s ring with an extremely scarce KUFIC inscription.

This type of ring is also known as a “thumb ring”.

This is an earlier type of Archer’s ring and it is VERY rare to find one with an inscription on it. 

We have researched over 1,000 medieval archer’s rings in museums, dealer’s websites, auctions, private collections and not been able to locate another one with a Kufic inscription.

The angular Kufic letters are a style that date from the early Islamic period.

This Archer’s thumb ring is around 1,000 years old and highly desirable.

The Kufic inscription is difficult to read but you can clearly see the letters that make up the name “Ahmad” or “Hameed”.

The bamboo bow of Rasool Allah (saw) is kept in the Topkapi Museum in Turkey.

In thirty years of business in the antiques trade, this is the first and only early Islamic archer’s thumb ring that we have encountered with a Kufic inscription. We have seen over a thousand regular standard Islamic, Roman, Greek, Chinese and Byzantine archer’s thumb rings. They are usually of the ‘standard’ type.

Most surviving archer’s thumb rings from the early period are Roman or Chinese and these are quite common as there were hundreds of thousands of archers over the centuries. You can see the typical shaped very common ancient archer’s thumb rings on many websites from dealers.

A 2,000 year old Egyptian stone archer’s thumb ring that was excavated only 1,000 km from Mecca is in a UK museum (Liverpool).

What is interesting about the ancient Egyptian archer’s ring and the one we are offering is that they both have a diameter of 45mm.

The inner diameter of our archer’s thumb ring is 30mm.

Early Muslim archers used the THUMB to draw the string back and they wore a ring on their thumb to protect it from the string, and the release.

On Wikipedia there is a very interesting article about early Arab archery with references to Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and his encouragement of learning archery.

You should also be aware that around 90% of archer’s and ancient rings being offered on the internet are reproductions/fakes (details available on request)

We only sell genuine antiquities that are guaranteed as described.

Condition is as shown in the images, wear and tear commensurate with age and having been in the ground for several centuries.

From a private North of England collection formed in the 1980’s.