Wheeled Vehicles
1. The Meaning of the Innovation
Hardly any other invention has received the widespread recognition accorded to the wheel. For a long period the steam engine was regarded as the most important invention of all, but this view significantly changed with the invention of the automobile. The wheel allowed greater speed of movement and the transportation of heavy objects, and is still an essential component of many machines today.
Link The most important innovation following the wheel was the wagon. The wagon exercised great fascination for prehistoric societies, and the wheel spread rapidly with the wagon between the North Sea and the Middle East in the fourth millennium BCE.
Link Wagons allow societies to live with much greater mobility by enabling people to carry possessions with them. Wagon construction is closely interlinked with the development of new weapons and metallurgy. The construction of new wheels depended on the availability of improved woodworking tools made of copper-arsenic alloys. The most important improvement to the wheel was the development of the spoke wheel, which revolutionized warfare and overland journeys in the second millennium BCE. The light chariot was used variously in battle and was associated with the improvement in weapons and armor in the Late Bronze Age. A veritable arms build-up began. The development of the spoke wheel brought the domestication of horses and camels in large parts of Eurasia and Africa in order to harness them to wagons that had become significantly lighter and faster. From the Late Bronze Age that was an important precondition for the development of horseback warriors who dominated the battlefields right into the Late Middle Ages.
The arrival of the chariot was accompanied by new concepts of belief in which the sun’s movement was associated with a celestial wagon. Evidence for this extends from Egypt to southern Scandinavia, and even in the early Middle Ages pagan gods were still depicted riding through the heavens in wagons.
The wheel not only represents the invention of rotation but also the realization that rotation could used be in other, totally different contexts. For example, the idea of making a circular disk rotate on an axis was the basis of the fast-revolving potter’s wheel. Additionally, new ways of labeling property, such as the cylinder seal, were invented, and the idea of doors hinged on an axis only became possible after the invention of wheeled vehicles. The wheel was also essential in medieval technology, e.g. for cranes and mills. The mill combined the use of waterpower or wind power with cogs and bucket wheels and the camshaft, and was the basis of many branches of production until the Industrial Revolution. Cogs are essential machine components and were not supplanted until the arrival of digitization. However, they are still used today in some clock mechanisms. The invention of the car and the railways would not have been possible without the wheel, and it is still an indispensable part of the undercarriage in today’s airplanes.
2. The Foundations of the Innovation
The foundations of the prehistoric wagon appear relatively simple: construction of a wagon required knowledge of rotational motion, two strong traction animals trained to walk at a measured pace, the technical knowhow of carpenters for constructing the wheels and wagon box and appropriate tools, and knowledge of a harness that facilitated the transfer of the tractive force to the wheels.
The early wagons were solely cattle-drawn and had wheels made of wooden disks. This means that the Neolithic economic system that developed in the Fertile Crescent between the tenth and the seventh millennium, the process known as the Neolithic Revolution, was essential for the wagon. Wagon construction was simply not possible without the diffusion of domesticized cattle.
The Neolithic Revolution did not, however, automatically lead to wagon construction. The development of the wagon was probably a long process, with cattle initially being used for the transportation of heavy loads. Very isolated evidence of this already appears from the sixth and seventh millennium in Israel, and perhaps in southern Spain.
The notion of a rotating axis with a disk was already used in Neolithic spindle whorls, and early stone drills attest to supra-regional knowledge of rotational movement from the sixth millennium onward. But at the moment it is difficult to say from which point in time sufficient tools were available for the early wheels because we lack appropriate examinations of the surviving wheels. On the other hand, the sophisticated stone tools used in Europe in the Neolithic Age to build the big longhouses of the Linear Pottery Age would have sufficed to make wooden disk wheels. The very early testimonies of wheeled vehicles in Northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark around 3000 BCE also show that, in contradiction to earlier suppositions, metal tools were not absolutely necessary because in the above-mentioned regions such artifacts could not yet have been produced around 3000 BCE.
In other words, the requisite knowledge for the construction of wheeled vehicles was available before 5000 BCE in wide areas of western Eurasia. Nonetheless, the first wagons do not appear in the pattern of archaeological finds until the middle of the fourth millennium BCE.
3. A Chronological Outline of the Innovation
According to the current state of knowledge, the wagon was invented in the early fourth millennium. It spread so quickly that its diffusion can only partly be traced by archaeological means.
Link The first proofs of the existence of the wheel are located in the period between 4000 and 3600 BCE. They consisted, on the one hand, of small clay figurines of animals with perforated feet, and on the other hand, of a group of cast figures of bulls wearing a yoke, which probably belonged to copper models of wagons. Some miniature wheels have also been found, but without the model wagons they belonged to.
The dating of all these finds is uncertain and they are difficult to interpret. Nonetheless they are combined to assume knowledge, and perhaps even development, of early wheeled vehicles in the region between the Alps and the Black Sea. This is supported by the fact that comparable early finds have not occurred to date in other regions. On the other hand, the first reliable examples were already adapted to specific local conditions and can best be explained as the result of an earlier invention and diffusion.
Link Evidence shows that the wheel and the wagon had already spread to large parts of western Eurasia around 3500 BCE. Aside from the two-dimensional depiction on pottery vessels and petroglyphs, there are examples of drinking vessels on wheels and preserved wagon tracks. Some tombs with remains of wagons from the northern Black Sea area also belong to this period, along with signs on clay tablets from Uruk, in the area of present-day Iraq, that have been interpreted as wagons or sleds on wheels.
Link Starting in 3200 BCE, wooden wagon parts appear for the first time in the moors and lakeside settlements around the Alps and in northern Central Europe. Somewhat later, around 3000 BCE, the number of surviving wagons multiplies through the introduction of wagon burials in the pit grave culture that spread from Bulgaria to the North Pontic steppe. In Mesopotamia, too, the existence of wagon parts is first verifiable after 2900–2700 BCE, and they are accompanied by numerous models and pictorial representations. The wagon reached Central Asia in the third millennium, and the wheel only arrived in Egypt, by way of Israel, around 2400 to 2300 BCE, and was initially used not for wagons but for siege engines.
4. The Diffusion and Boundaries of the Innovation
Link Wheeled vehicles were so interesting for prehistoric societies that within a short time, perhaps even in the course of a single century, different, locally adapted versions of the wagon spread between the North Sea and the Baltic sea in the north, and the Alps and the Black Sea in the south. It was not until a short time later that wagons were used for the first time in the ancient Near East, then in Anatolia, the Levant and Central Asia. However, large parts of the world seem (perhaps deliberately?) to have rejected the innovation. They include Egypt and the rest of Africa, Greece, Western Europe and the British Isles as well as the Eurasian forest steppe and East Asia. The reasons for this differ widely in each case. In the flood areas of the Nile it was simply not practicable to construct vehicles with wheels, so sleds were used instead, whereas the hunters and gatherers of northern Eurasia simply lacked the technical preconditions for wagon construction. On the other hand, China, given its isolation from the regions where wagons were constructed, may have failed to acquire knowledge of wagon construction and usage. This situation only changed fundamentally with the invention of the light spoked wheel wagon and, in the second millennium BCE, the (spoked) wheel, together with the domestic horse, was rapidly adapted in Egypt, the Sahara, Western Europe and China, and altered to fit each region’s particular requirements.
5. How Did the Innovation Spread?
Surprisingly, the success story of the wheel and the wagon is not based on the increased mobility it brought. Initially, in fact, the wheel did not enable quicker travel from one place to another. The main obstacle to this was the absence of an adequately developed network of roads.
Early wagons were only as fast as the “engine” – a cattle team – could walk. They still lacked a steerable front axle and consequently had a very large turning radius, so they could not be meaningfully deployed either in battle or in races. River transportation remained faster until after the beginning of Roman Empire.
The diffusion of the wheel and the wagon occurred over a long time period and was supported by two main factors:
First, the wagon was very useful in everyday life, for harvesting, for example, or for moving hay and soil. Wagons enabled the farming of outlying fields and the production of bigger surpluses. Wagons with yoked cattle could also drive a plow or drag big stones away from the field. This made the wagon a very useful innovation. To facilitate using it more often, Neolithic societies already built paths for riding across moors, for example, and built villages and funerary monuments along negotiable roads.
Wagons and the cattle that pulled them quickly became a status symbol and assumed a central role in Neolithic ideology. This new form of motion, by which people were slightly raised above the ground and almost floated without their own physical effort, became a hallmark of the powerful. This lasted into the early modern era when the stately coach was still the fitting transportation for the European nobility.
With the basic elements of wagon construction available in nearly every Neolithic society, the wheel and the wagon initially diffused very quickly. However, they were not only rejected in places where the technical foundations were absent but also, for example, in Greece and Egypt. It is difficult to grasp the early development of the wagon on the basis of archeological sources alone.
Completely different kinds of wagon, each with its own regional diffusion, were already being constructed in the second half of the fourth millennium. In the Alpine region they were two-wheeled carts with rotating axles, while wagons with rigid axles were in use in the rest of the diffusion area. Four-wheeled and two-wheeled wagons are also known to have existed simultaneously.
The continued development of the wagon occurred, first, within these types of regions, which were limited by natural environmental preconditions and socio-technical prerequisites, and second, through innovative improvements, such as the above-mentioned spoked wheel that spread rapidly across Eurasia and North Africa.
The further development of the prehistoric wagon was mainly concerned with optimizing its speed. This was achieved through the emergence of new, lighter types of wheel (an early disk wheel weighed over 32 kg), and new draft animals. Advances in metallurgy such as arsenic bronze enabled the production of thinner and harder tools for woodworking. This was the foundation for the development of lighter and more stable wheel constructions. The multi-component spoked wheel was developed in the area between the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and Iran. In Oriental high cultures this type of wheel was additionally reinforced, first with copper nails on the rim and then with tire segments made of arsenic-copper alloy. Equids, either domesticated wild donkeys or a now-extinct species of horse, were harnessed to the front of the wagon instead of cattle. This allowed wagons to roll significantly faster and to be used in combat. In Central Asia the Bactrian camel was harnessed to very similar wagons. The breeding of these animals was a secret, and in the third millennium specific cities in the ancient Orient were already known for producing particularly good draft animals.
Arsenic-copper alloys and the breeding of equids were far less widespread than the earliest wagons. It is likely, first, that the technical preconditions were lacking and second, that the requisite knowledge was subject to a kind of secrecy. This explains why decisive improvements to the disk wheel in the late third millennium were limited to the area between the Black Sea and western Central Asia.
The result was not stagnation, however, but simply other paths of innovation. By the middle of the second millennium BCE, if not before, the one-piece disk wheel was furnished with a loose hub. The result was that the spot with the heaviest attrition could be replaced when necessary but the wheel itself could be in use for longer. In fact, we should actually speak of several innovation processes occurring in parallel and mutually influencing each other.
According to present-day knowledge, the spoked wheel spread almost simultaneously between the Carpathian Basin, the Near East, the southern Urals, Central Asia and Pakistan. It is not possible to identify a definitive center for its emergence.
The oldest archeological examples of realia are found in the Andronovo culture, and consist of discolorations from spoked wheels preserved in the soil. However, miniature wheels with painted spokes of the same age, or even significantly older, can be found in the Carpathian Basin and the high cultures of the ancient Near East.
With the development of the spoked wheel, in the second millennium BCE the wagon finally spread into the Eurasian steppes and reached China and the regions in North Africa and Western Europe, where no earlier evidence for the wheel and wagon has yet been found.
6. Further Reading
Mary A. Littauer and Joust H. Crouwel. “Selected Writings on Chariots and other Early Vehicles, Riding and Harness,” ed. by Peter Raulwing. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 6. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
Mamoun Fansa and Stefan Burmeister, eds. “Rad und Wagen. Der Ursprung einer Innovation. Wagen im Vorderen Orient und Europa.” Beiheft der Archäologischen Mitteilungen aus Nordwestdeutschland 40 (Mainz, 2004).
Pierre Pétrequin, Rose Marie Arbogast, Anne Marie Pétrequin, Samuel van Willingen and Maxence Bailly, eds. “Premiers chariot, premiers araires. La diffusion de la traction animale en Europe pendant les Ive et IIIe millénaires avant notre ère.” CRA monographies 29 (Paris, 2006).
Alexander Pruß, Figurines and Model Vehicles. In: M. Lebeau, ed. Jezirah. ARCANE 1, Turnhout, 2011: 239-254.
Austin Hill. Specialized Pastoralism and Social Stratification. Analysis of the Fauna from Chalcolithic Tel Tsaf, Israel. PhD thesis. University of Connetticut AI3504774, 2011. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI3504774 (accessed 03/16/2017).
Florian Klimscha. “Transforming Technical Know-how in Time and Space. Using the Digital Atlas of Innovations to Understand the Innovation Process of Animal Traction and the Wheel.” eTopoi. Journal for Ancient Studies 6, 2017: 16-63.
7. How do I cite this map?
F. Klimscha, “Wheeled Vehicles.” In: S. Hansen, J. Renn, F. Klimscha & J. Büttner, The Digital Atlas of Innovations. Berlin 2012–2017.
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