bows became widespread. The stiffened end of the bow is a "siyah" (Arabic, Persian), "szarv" (Hungarian), "sarvi" (Finnish; both 'sarvi' and 'szarv' mean 'horn') or "kasan" (Turkish); the bending section is a "dustar" (Arabic), "lapa" (Finnish) or "sal" (Turkish). For centuries, the stiffening was accomplished by attaching laths of bone or antler to the sides of the bow at its ends. The bone or antler strips are more likely to survive burial than the rest of the bow. The first bone strips suitable for this purpose come from "graves of the fourth or third centuries" BCE. These stiffeners are found associated with nomads of the time. Maenchen-Helfen states that they are not found in Achaemenid Persia, in early Imperial Rome, or in Han China. However, Coulston attributes Roman stiffeners to about or before 9 CE. He identifies a Steppe Tradition of Scythian bows with working tips, which lasted, in Europe, until the arrival of the Huns, and a Near East or Levantine tradition with siyahs, possibly introduced by the Parni as siyahs are found in Sassanid but not Achaemenid contexts. Siyahs have also been described on the Arabian peninsula. Composite bows were adopted by the Roman Empire and were made even in the cold and damp of Britannia. They were the normal weapon of later Roman archers, both infantry and cavalry units (although Vegetius recommends training recruits "arcubus ligneis", with wooden bows). Laths stiffening the grip A new bow type, in which bone reinforcements cover the handle of the bow as well as the tips, may have developed in Central Asia during the 3rd to 2nd century BCE, with earliest finds from the area of Lake Baikal. Fittings from this type of bow appear right across Asia from Korea to the Crimea. Such bows with reinforcement of both grip and siyahs have been called “Hun,” "Hunnic", or “Hsiung-nu” composite bows. Huns did use such bows, but so did many other peoples; Rausing termed this type the 'Qum-Darya Bow' from the Han Chinese-type site at the frontier post of Loulan, at the mouth of the Qum Darya river, dated by analogy between c. 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE. With the arrival of the Huns, this tradition of bows with stiffened grips came to Europe. "Alanic graves in the Volga region dating to the 3rd to 4th century CE signal the adoption of the Qum-Darya type by Sarmatian peoples