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Prehistoric transport: rolling along

The invention of the wheel increased human mobility immensely. There has been speculation that heavy loads, such as the massive stones of the pyramids or megalithic monuments, could have been moved on wooden rollers. There seems no evidence for or against the idea. All one can say is that it is possible that a rolling log generated the idea of the wheel for transport. The truth is that we simply don't know. As with horse-riding, images from Sumeria led to the supposition that it took the lead. The best-known of these images are war wagons on the Standard of Ur. They have wheels of the earliest type - solid rather than spoked. Yet these are by no means the earliest images of wheeled vehicles. The Standard of Ur dates from about 2600 BC.

Pictographs of wagons appear around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia and on a Funnel Beaker pot from Poland. However the earliest evidence of the wheel comes from the Late Cucuteni-Tripolye culture of what is now Romania and the Ukraine, in the form of wheeled animal and house models. Around 3,600 BC the culture produced models of sledges harnessed with oxen.^{1I. Manzura, Steps to the steppe: or, how the North Pontic region was colonised, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, vol. 24, no. 4 (2005), pp. 313–338 (327).} By the inventive stroke of adding wheels, it seems that the sledge became the cart. The forest-steppe zone whence this mixed culture sprang had the big trees needed for solid wheels, yet access to plains traversable by wheeled traffic, and so was ideal for the development of wheeled vehicles. The earliest surviving complete vehicles come from the steppes. The remains of about 250 wagons or carts, dated around 3000-2000 BC, have been found in kurgans (burial mounds) in the Russian and Ukrainian steppes. Such burials were often rich in grave goods and probably of significant people. A wagon from Ostannii kurgan was radiocarbon dated to 3300-2900 BC. The inventors of a technology are inevitably the first to name it, and other language-speakers who adopt the technology often adopt the foreign name for it as well. Proto-Indo-European had its own words for wheels and wagons. ^{2D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), pp. 65-72; A. Parpola, Proto-Indo-European speakers of the Late Tripolye culture as the inventors of wheeled vehicles: Linguistic and archaeological considerations, paper read at the 19th Annual University of California Indo-European Conference.}

The new technology soon spread. Working on a pile-dwelling settlement in the Ljubljana marshes in April 2002, Slovenian archaeologists discovered an ancient wooden wheel in amazingly good condition, and nearby a wooden axle. They had been preserved by the boggy, oxygen-free conditions. Radiocarbon-dated to between 5,100 and 5,350 years old (3350-3100 BC), it is the oldest reliably dated wooden wheel so far found in the world. It has a radius of 70 centimetres and is five cm thick. The square-cut axle would have rotated with the wheel. It was probably part of a single-axle oxcart. Cart models of c. 3,000 BC from Altyn-depe, in Western Central Asia, suggest that the earliest carts were two-wheeled and pulled by oxen. Altyn-depe is a Copper and Bronze Age settlement.^{3Lyubov Kirtcho, The earliest wheeled transport in Southwestern Central Asia: new finds from Altyn-Depe, Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia, vol. 37, issue 1 (2009),pp.25-33.} In other regions too, wheels and wagons seem to arrive with metallurgy. Another find from the Ljubljana site was a mould for copper axes.^{4Slovenian Government Communications Office press release March 2003.} Earlier evidence for wheels has been claimed for Flintbek in north Germany, where what appear to be cart tracks and plough marks were found sealed between different strata of a Neolithic long barrow. Similar plough marks have been found beneath one or two long barrows in Britain. However it is now recognised that these were probably produced by site clearance. Dragging away a tree away with two big roots would leave marks similar to cart tracks.

Other solid wooden wheels have been found preserved in bogs and lakes in central and northern Europe. So the Slovenian wheel can be fitted into a regional tradition. Early wheels found in the Alps are of the same revolving-axle design. This created more drag and was less efficient than the revolving wheel design found in northern Europe and on the steppes, but it was easier to make. ^{5D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), pp. 69-72.} Further east the advanced Indus Valley Civilization had wheeled vehicles, as we see from the model carts found there.

The chariot

The invention of spoked wheels around 2000 BC made possible a lighter vehicle, the chariot, which could be used to devastating effect in warfare. It is from this period that evidence grows for the use of horses in war. Once again early images of the technology appear in the Near East, but its origin appears to lie in the Eurasian steppes. At least 16 graves of the Sintashta culture, Russia, had contained vehicles with two, spoked wheels. As they rotted they left stains preserving their shape. They are dated 2100-1700 BCE, older than the oldest chariots known in the Near East. From the steppe, chariots were introduced into the Near East together with steppe horses and studded disk cheekpieces.^{6D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), chap. 15; M. A. Littauer and J. H. Crouwel, ed. by Peter Raulwing, Selected Writings on Chariots and other Early Vehicles, Riding and Harness (2002); R. Drews, Early Riders: The Beginnings of Mounted Warfare in Asia and Europe (2004).}

The swift-moving chariot became the favoured transport of the elite. From the Levant it was taken to Egypt, probably by the Hyksos, a Semitic people who invaded lower Egypt. Ironically the Hyksos were ultimately expelled c. 1575 BC by Ahmose I, who is depicted defeating them from his chariot.^{7N.Fields, Bronze Age War Chariots (2006), p.7; note that the date for the start of the reign of Ahmose is now 1557 BC: C. B. Ramsey et al., Radiocarbon-Based Chronology for Dynastic Egypt, Science, vol. 328. no. 5985 (18 June 2010), pp. 1554-1557.}

Meanwhile the chariot also moved westward via the steppe north of the Black Sea to the Lower Danube area, and up the Danube. From the Carpathian Basin it seems that the chariot reached Mycenean Greece by about 1600 BC. The characteristic Myceanean type had four spokes per wheel. The concept had moved across Europe by about 1300 BC, when chariots are depicted on engraved slabs in a noble's tomb in Sweden and warrior stelae in south-west Iberia. ^{8B. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans (2008), pp.223-5; R.Harrison, Symbols and Warriors: Images of the European Bronze Age (2004); N.Fields, Bronze Age War Chariots (2006), pp. 22-23.} But these cases were exceptional, no doubt the result of long-distance travel. The chariot reached central Europe centuries later, as the Cimmerians fled up the Danube from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, bringing chariot-horses with them. The concept fed into the Hallstatt C Culture formed around 750 BC, and was spread more widely by the movements of the Celts.

The scythed chariot was vicious contraption invented by the Persians, who used them against the Greeks. ^{9Xenophon, Hellenica IV,1.} The idea seems to have reached the British Isles. In the 1st century AD the British were reported to make war in two-horse chariots called covinni, with axles equipped with scythes.^{10Pomponius Mela's Description of the World, ed. Frank E. Romer (1998), p. 116 (book 3, chapter 52).} A fearsome chariot features in Early Irish literature as the war vehicle of the hero Cuchulain:

The chariot was studded with dartlets, lancelets, spearlets, and hardened spits, so that every portion of the frame bristled with points in that chariot and every corner and end and point and face of that chariot was a passage of laceration... the hero of valour sprang into his scythed war-chariot, with its iron sickles, its thin blades, its hooks and its hard spikes.^{11The Cattle-Raid of Cooley, trans. J. Dunn (1914).}

Later chariots could be expensively plated with bronze, making them even more desirable as status symbols. These glamorous vehicles are beloved by film-makers aiming to recreate life in the great civilizations. They have a considerable amount of evidence to draw on. Depictions of chariots appear in carvings, murals, mosaics and pot decoration. They are listed in royal inventories and mentioned in histories.

By contrast we are generally reliant on archaeology for evidence of the transport used by those cultures outside the literate world, primarily burials including chariots. Permafrost preserved the four-wheeled example shown here from a Scythian burial mound in Siberia. Chariot burials though are mainly confined to Continental Eurasia. So the unearthing in 2001 of an Iron Age chariot burial at Wetwang, England, hit the headlines.^{12J. D. Hill, Wetwang - Chariot burial, Current Archaeology, vol. 15, no. 178 (March 2002), pp. 410-412; J.D. Hill, A new cart/chariot burial from Wetwang, East Yorkshire, Past: Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society, no. 38 (August 2001), pp. 2-3.} Most surprising to many was the fact that the grave was that of a woman. Yet chariot burials had been found at Wetwang before, including one of a woman. They fall within the one area of Britain noted for its chariot burials - East Yorkshire, the territory of the Iron Age tribe the Parisi.^{13I. M. Stead, The Arras Culture (Yorkshire Philosophical Society 1979), pp. 20 – 29.} For decades it was thought that, within Britain, the practice of burying the elite with their vehicles was unique to them. Archaeologists were amazed to find a chariot at Newbridge near Edinburgh in 2001.^{14S. Carter and F. Hunt, An Iron Age chariot burial from Scotland, Antiquity, vol. 77, no. 297 (September 2003), pp. 531–535.}

Notes

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Page created by Jean Manco 4 April 2011, by extract from early transport page. Last edited 19-11-2011.  XHTML: CSS