The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

by David W. Anthony

  Then there was the problem of the draft—the total weight, with drag, pulled by the animal team. Whereas a sledge could be pulled using traces, or flexible straps and ropes, a wagon or cart had to have a rigid draft pole, or thill, and a rigid yoke. The weight of these elements increased the overall draft. One way to reduce the draft was to reduce the diameter of the axle arms to fit a smaller hole in the wheel. A large-diameter axle was strong but created more friction between the axle arms and the revolving wheel. A smaller-diameter axle arm would cause less drag but would break easily unless the wagon was very narrow. The first wagon-wrights had to calculate the relationship between drag, axle diameter/strength, axle length/rigidity, and the width of the wagon bed. In a work vehicle meant to carry heavy loads, a short axle with small-diameter axle arms and a narrow wagon bed made good engineering sense, and, in fact, this is what the earliest wagons looked like, with a bed only about 1 m wide. Another way to reduce the draft was to reduce the number of wheels from four to two—to make a wagon into a cart. The draft of a modern two-wheeled cart is 40% less than a four-wheeled wagon of the same weight, and we can assume that an advantage of approximately the same magnitude applied to ancient carts. Carts were lighter and easier to pull, and on rough ground were less likely to get stuck. Large loads probably still needed wagons, but carts would have been useful for smaller loads.9

  Archaeological and inscriptional evidence for wheeled vehicles is widespread after about 3400 BCE. One uncertain piece of evidence, a track preserved under a barrow grave at Flintbek in northern Germany, might have been made by wheels, and might be as old as 3600 BCE. But the real explosion of evidence begins about 3400 BCE. Wheeled vehicles appeared in four different media dated between about 3400 and 3000 BCE—a written sign for wagons, two-dimensional images of wagons and carts, three-dimensional models of wagons, and preserved wooden wheels and wagon parts themselves. These four independent kinds of evidence appeared across the ancient world between 3400 and 3000 BCE, about the same time as wool sheep, and clearly indicate when wheeled vehicles became widespread. The next four sections discuss the four kinds of evidence.10

  Mesopotamian Wagons: The Oldest Written Evidence

  Clay tablets with “wagon” signs impressed on them were found in the Eanna temple precinct in Uruk, one of the first cities created by humans. About thirty-nine hundred tablets were recovered from level IVa, the end of Late Uruk. In these texts, among the oldest documents in the world, a pictograph (figure 4.3.f) shows a four-wheeled wagon with some kind of canopy or superstructure. The “wagon” sign occurred just three times in thirty-nine hundred texts, whereas the sign for “sledge”—a similar kind of transport, but dragged on runners not rolled on wheels—occurred thirty-eight times. Wagons were not yet common.

  The Eanna precinct tablets were inside Temple C when it burned down. Charcoal from the Temple C roof timbers yielded four radiocarbon dates averaging about 3500–3370 BCE. A radiocarbon date tells us when the dated material, in this case wood, died, not when it was burned. The wood in the center of any tree is actually dead (something few people realize); only the outer ring of bark and the sappy wood just beneath it are alive. If the timbers in Temple C were made from the center of a large tree, the wood might have died a century or two before the building was burned down, so the actual age of the Temple C tablets is later than the radiocarbon date, perhaps 3300–3100 BCE. Sledges still were far more common than wagons in the city of Uruk at that date. Ox-drawn canopied sledges might have preceded canopied wagons as a form of transport (in parades or processions? harvest rituals?) used by city officials.

  A circular clay object that might be a model wheel, perhaps from a small ceramic model of a wagon, was found at the site of Arslantepe in eastern Turkey, in the ruins of a temple-palace from level VIa at the site, also dated 3400–3100 BCE (figure 4.3.c). Arslantepe was one of a string of native strongholds along the upper Euphrates River in eastern Anatolia that entered into close relations with faraway Uruk during the Late Uruk period. Although the kind of activities that lay behind this “Uruk expansion” northward up the Euphrates valley is not known (see chapter 12), the possible clay wheel model at Arslantepe could indicate that wagons were being used in eastern Anatolia during the period of Late Uruk influence.

  Wagons and Carts from the Rhine to the Volga: The Oldest Pictorial Evidence

  A two-dimensional image that seems to portray a four-wheeled wagon, harness pole, and yoke was incised on the surface of a decorated clay mug of the Trichterbecker (TRB) culture found at the settlement of Bronocice in southern Poland, dated about 3500–3350 BCE (figure 4.3.b). The TRB culture is recognized by its distinctive pottery shapes and tombs, which are found over a broad region in modern Poland, eastern Germany, and southern Denmark. Most TRB people were simple farmers who lived in small agricultural villages, but the Bronocice settlement was unusually large, a TRB town covering fifty-two hectares. The cup or mug with the wagon image incised on its surface was found in a rubbish pit containing animal bones, the broken sherds of five clay vessels, and flint tools. Only this cup had a wagon image. The design is unusual for TRB pottery, not an accidental combination of normal decorative motifs. The cup’s date is the subject of some disagreement. A cattle bone found in the same pit yielded an average age of about 3500 BCE, whereas six of the seven other radiocarbon dates for the settlement around the pit average 150 years later, about 3350 BCE. The excavators accept an age range spanning these results, about 3500–3350 BCE. The Bronocice wagon image is the oldest well-dated image of a wheeled vehicle in the world.

  Two other images could be about the same age, although they probably are somewhat later. An image of two large-horned cattle pulling what seems to be a two-wheeled cart was scratched on the wall of a Wartberg culture stone tomb at Lohne-Züschen I, Hesse, central Germany (figure 4.3.e). The grave was reused over a long period of time between about 3400 and 2800 BCE, so the image could have been carved any time in that span. Far away to the east, a metal cauldron from the Evdik kurgan near the mouth of the Volga River bears a repoussé image that might show a yoke, a wheel, a cart, and a draft animal; it was found in a grave with objects of the Novosvobodnaya culture, dated between 3500 and 3100 BCE (figure 4.3.a). These images of carts and wagons are distributed from central Germany through southern Poland to the Russian steppes.

  Figure 4.3 The oldest images and models of wagons and wheels: (a) bronze kettle from Evdik kurgan, lower Volga, Russia, with a design that could represent, from the left, a yoke, cart, wheel, X-braced floor, and animal head; (b) image of a four-wheeled wagon on a ceramic vessel from Bronocice, southern Poland; (c) ceramic wheel (from a clay model?) at Arslantepe, eastern Anatolia; (d) ceramic wagon model from Baden grave 177 at Budakalász, Hungary; (e) cart image with two cattle incised on stone, from a tomb at Lohne-Züschen I, Hesse, central Germany; (f) earliest written symbols for a wagon, on clay tablets from Uruk IVa, southern Iraq. After (a) Shilov and Bagautdinov 1997; (b, d, e) Milisauskas 2002; (c,f) Bakker et al. 1999.

  Hungarian Wagons: The Oldest Clay Models

  The Baden culture is recognized by its pottery and to a certain extent by its distinctive copper tools, weapons, and ornaments. It appeared in Hungary about 3500 BCE, and the styles that define it then spread into northern Serbia, western Romania, Slovakia, Moravia, and southern Poland. Baden-style polished and channeled ceramic mugs and small pots were used across southeastern Europe about 3500–3000 BCE. Similarities between Baden ceramics and those of northwestern Anatolia in the centuries before Troy I suggest one route by which wheeled vehicles could have spread between Mesopotamia and Europe. Three-dimensional ceramic models of four-wheeled wagons (figure 4.3.d) were included in sacrificial deposits associated with two graves of the Late Baden (Pécel) culture at Budakalász (Grave 177) and Szigetszentmárton in eastern Hungary, dated about 3300–3100 BCE. Paired oxen, almost certainly a team, were found sacrificed in Grave 3 at Budakalász and in other Late Baden graves in Hungary. Paired oxen also were placed in graves
of the partly contemporary Globular Amphorae culture (3200–2700 BCE) in central and southern Poland. The Baden wagon models are the oldest well-dated three-dimensional models of wheeled vehicles.

  Steppe and Bog Vehicles: The Oldest Actual Wagons

  Remains of about 250 wagons and carts have been discovered under earthen burial mounds, or kurgans, in the steppe grasslands of Russia and Ukraine, dated about 3000–2000 BCE (figure 4.4 and figure 4.5). The wheels were 50–80 cm in diameter. Some were made of a single plank cut vertically from the trunk of a tree, with the grain (not like a salami). Most steppe wheels, however, were made of two or three planks cut into circular segments and then doweled together with mortice-and-tenon joints. In the center were long tapered naves (hubs), about 20–30 cm wide at the base and projecting outward about 10–20 cm on either side of the wheel. The naves were secured to the axle arms by a lynchpin that pinned the nave to the axle, and between them they kept the wheel from wobbling. The axles had rounded axle arms for the wheel mounts and were about 2 m long. The wagons themselves were about 1 m wide and about 2 m long. The earliest radiocarbon dates on wood from steppe wagons average around 3300–2800 BCE. A wagon or cart grave at Bal’ki kurgan (grave 57) on the lower Dnieper was dated 4370 ± 120 BP, or 3330–2880 BCE; and wood from a wagon buried in Ostanni kurgan 1 (grave 160) on the Kuban River was dated 4440 ± 40 BP, or 3320–2930 BCE. The probability distributions for both dates lie predominantly before 3000 BCE, so both vehicles probably date before 3000 BCE. But these funeral vehicles can hardly have been the very first wagons used in the steppes.

  Figure 4.4 Preserved wagon parts and wheels: (a) two solid wooden wheels at the corners of grave 57, Bal’ki kurgan, Ukraine, radiocarbon dated 3330–2900 BCE; (b) Catacomb-culture tripartite wheel with dowels, probably 2600–2200 BCE; (c) preserved axle and reconstructed wagon from various preserved wheel and wagon fragments in bog deposits in northwestern Germany and Denmark dated about 3000–2800 BCE. After (a) Lyashko and Otroshchenko 1988; (b) Korpusova and Lyashko 1990; (c) Hayen 1989.

  Figure 4.5 The best-preserved wagon graves in the steppes are in the Kuban River region in southern Russia. This wagon was buried under Ostannii kurgan 1. Radiocarbon dated about 3300–2900 BCE, the upper part of the wagon is on the left and the lower part, on the right. After Gei 2000, figure 53.

  Other wooden wheels and axles have been discovered preserved in bogs or lakes in central and northern Europe. In the mountains of Switzerland and southwestern Germany wagon-wrights made the axle arms square and mortised them into a square hole in the wheel. The middle of the axle was circular and revolved under the wagon. This revolving-axle design created more drag and was less efficient than the revolving-wheel design, but it did not require carving large wooden naves and so the Alpine wheels were much easier to make. One found near Zurich in a waterlogged settlement of the Horgen culture (the Pressehaus site) was dated about 3200 BCE by associated tree-ring dates. The Pressehaus wheel tells us that separate regional European design traditions for wheel making already existed before 3200 BCE. Wooden wheels and axles also have been found in bogs in the Netherlands and Denmark, providing important evidence on the construction details of early wagons, but dated after 3000 BCE. They had fixed axles and revolving wheels, like those of the steppes and central Europe.

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WHEEL

  It would be difficult to exaggerate the social and economic importance of the first wheeled transport. Before wheeled vehicles were invented, really heavy things could be moved efficiently only on water, using barges or rafts, or by organizing a large hauling group on land. Some of the heavier items that prehistoric, temperate European farmers had to haul across land all the time included harvested grain crops, hay crops, manure for fertilizer, firewood, building lumber, clay for pottery making, hides and leather, and people. In northern and western Europe, some Neolithic communities celebrated their hauling capacities by moving gigantic stones to make megalithic community tombs and stone henges; other communities hauled earth, making massive earthworks. These constructions demonstrated in a visible, permanent way the solidity and strength of the communities that made them, which depended in many ways on human hauling capacities. The importance and significance of the village community as a group transport device changed profoundly with the introduction of wagons, which passed on the burden of hauling to animals and machines, where it has remained ever since.

  Although the earliest wagons were slow and clumsy, and probably required teams of specially trained oxen, they permitted single families to carry manure out to the fields and to bring firewood, supplies, crops, and people back home. This reduced the need for cooperative communal labor and made single-family farms viable. Perhaps wagons contributed to the disappearance of large nucleated villages and the dispersal of many farming populations across the European landscape after about 3500 BCE. Wagons were useful in a different way in the open grasslands of the steppes, where the economy depended more on herding than on agriculture. Here wagons made portable things that had never been portable in bulk—shelter, water, and food. Herders who had always lived in the forested river valleys and grazed their herds timidly on the edges of the steppes now could take their tents, water, and food supplies to distant pastures far from the river valleys. The wagon was a mobile home that permitted herders to follow their animals deep into the grasslands and live in the open. Again, this permitted the dispersal of communities, in this case across interior steppes that earlier had been almost useless economically. Significant wealth and power could be extracted from larger herds spread over larger pastures.

  Andrew Sherratt bundled the invention of the wheel together with the invention of the plow, wool sheep, dairying, and the beginning of horse transport to explain a sweeping set of changes that occurred among European societies about 3500–3000 BCE. The Secondary Products Revolution (now often shortened to SPR), as Sherratt described it in 1981, was an economic explanation for widespread changes in settlement patterns, economy, rituals, and crafts, many of which had been ascribed by an older generation of archaeologists to Indo-European migrations. (“Secondary products” are items like wool, milk, and muscular power that can be harvested continuously from an animal without killing it, in contrast to “primary products” such as meat, blood, bone, and hides.) Much of the subject matter discussed in arguments over the SPR—the diffusion of wagons, horseback riding, and wool sheep—was also central in discussions of Indo-European expansions, but, in Sherratt’s view, all of them were derived by diffusion from the civilizations of the Near East rather than from Indo-Europeans. Indo-European languages were no longer central or even necessary to the argument, to the great relief of many archaeologists. But Sherrat’s proposal that all these innovations came from the Near East and entered Europe at about the same time quickly fell apart. Scratch-plows and dairying appeared in Europe long before 3500 BCE, and horse domestication was a local event in the steppes. An important fragment of the SPR survives in the conjoined diffusion of wool sheep and wagons across much of the ancient Near East and Europe between 3500 and 3000 BCE, but we do not know where either of these innovations started.11

  The clearest proof of the wheel’s impact was the speed with which wagon technology spread (figure 4.6), so rapidly, in fact, that we cannot even say where the wheel-and-axle principle was invented. Most specialists assume that the earliest wagons were produced in Mesopotamia, which was urban and therefore more sophisticated than the tribal societies of Europe; indeed, Mesopotamia had sledges that served as prototypes. But we really don’t know. Another prototype existed in Europe in the form of Mesolithic and Neolithic bent-wood sleds, doweled together with fine mortice-and-tenon joints; in much of eastern Europe, in fact, right up to the twentieth century, it made sense to park your wagon or carriage in the barn for the winter and resort to sleds, far more effective than wheels in snow and ice. Bent-wood sleds were at least as useful in prehistoric Europe as in Mesopotamia, and they began to appear in northern Europe as early as the Mesol
ithic; thus the skills needed to make wheels and axles existed in both Europe and the Near East.12

  Figure 4.6 Sites with early evidence for wheels or wagons: (1) Uruk; (2) Budakalasz; (3) Arslantepe; (4) Bronicice; (5) Flintbek; (6) Lohne-Zuschen I; (7) Bal’ki kurgan; (8) Ostannii kurgan; (9) Evdik kurgan. Dashed line indicates the distribution of about 250 wagon graves in the Pontic-Caspian steppes.

  Regardless of where the wheel-and-axle principle was invented, the technology spread rapidly over much of Europe and the Near East between 3400 and 3000 BCE. Proto-Indo-European speakers talked about wagons and wheels using their own words, created from Indo-European roots. Most of these words were o-stems, a relatively late development in Proto-Indo-European phonology. The wagon vocabulary shows that late Proto-Indo-European was spoken certainly after 4000 BCE, and probably after 3500 BCE. Anatolian is the only major early Indo-European branch that has a doubtful wheeled-vehicle vocabulary. As Bill Darden suggested, perhaps Pre-Anatolian split away from the archaic Proto-Indo-European dialects before wagons appeared in the Proto-Indo-European homeland. Pre-Anatolian could have been spoken before 4000 BCE. Late Proto-Indo-European, including the full wagon vocabulary, probably was spoken after 3500 BCE.