The Horse, The Wheel and the Chariot

The Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in the Yamna culture (3300-2500 BCE). Their expansion is linked to an early adoption of bronze weapons, the domestication of the horse in the Eurasian steppes and the invention of the chariot. The southern Steppe culture is believed to have carried predominantly R1b1b lineages, while the northern Forest-Steppe culture would have been essentially R1a-dominant.

The Kura-Araxes are located close to the heartland of early domestication of cereals and cattle in the Northern fertile crescent, and are bordered on one side by the Taurus mountains where the word for cattle comes from – the semitic root *tawro-s. The would all tie in nicely with the genesis of the Tocharians from the North Caucusus area – as an analysis of their plaid/tartan clothes tells us. They moved to the north of Caucasus were they met the stepe people (haplogroup R1a) Dniepr-Donets people and Sredny-Stog culture with their domesticted horses.

The infleunce of the Kura-Araxes culture, and maybe some population movement from the South Caucusus to the Steppe, provided the means and the impetus for the IE peoples to expand. The KA people probable didn’t speak IE, but may have spoken Hurri-urartian or Nakh-Dagestanian. PIE are both influenced by Semitic, North-West caucasian, Kvartvelian, Finno-Ugric and languages.

The IEs could have had a better technology, and this is why they were able to spread their language and culture over such and enormous territory. Thus, the most plausible explanation could be linked to the invention of the horse-drawn wheeled cart or horse-drawn chariot, an event that constituted a tremendous technological advancement to the whole of the PIE proto-civilization allowing ancient tribes to gradually migrate in all directions searching for new farming territory.

The horse was probably domesticated between the Dniepr and the Don around 4200-3500 BC (The Sredny Stog Culture), while the wheel seems to be invented in Sumer c. 3300-3100 BC. As you can easily see, the imaginary expansion circle (according to the present theory of wave expansion) for these two technological inventions seem to overlap in the area of the Caspian Sea at just about the same time as the mass migration of IEs supposedly began there, that is, circa 2900 BC.

It seems to be a proven fact that the Indo-Europeans already used horses at this period of time, so if they discovered the wheel manufactured by Sumarians (who used only donkeys and oxen at the time – e.g. earliest depictions c. 2600 BC, Ur), they could quickly adapt the new invention to horses, thus creating the wheeled horse-drawn cart – a very effective means of transportation of the time. (The other possibility being that the wheel was their own invention). In this way, they were able to spread all over Eurasia. In other words, the horse came from the north, the wheel came from the south, and the only narrow passage where they could have possibly met is the west coast of the Caspian Sea (!).

The wheel is indeed known to the Kura-Araxes archeological culture in the South Caucasus (3200-2500 BC). The earliest known spoke-wheeled chariots date from c. 2000-1800 BC (Sintashta-Petrovka findings southeast of Magnitogorsk, see map) which seems to coincide with the advances of Proto-Tocharians near the Urals in 1900-1800 BC.

The appearance of horse remains in human settlements in regions where they had not previously been present is another indicator of domestication. Although images of horses appear as early as the Upper Paleolithic period in places such as the caves of Lascaux, France, suggesting that wild horses lived in regions outside of the Eurasian steppes prior to domestication and may have even been hunted by early humans, concentration of remains suggests animals being deliberately captured and contained, an indicator of domestication, at least for food, if not necessarily use as a working animal.

About 4200-4000 BCE, more than 500 years before the geographic expansion evidenced by the presence of horse bones, new kinds of graves, named after a grave at Suvorovo, appeared north of the Danube delta in the coastal steppes of Ukraine near Izmail. Suvorovo graves were similar to and probably derived from earlier funeral traditions in the steppes around the Dnieper River.

Some Suvorovo graves contained polished stone mace-heads shaped like horse heads and horse tooth beads. Earlier steppe graves also had contained polished stone mace-heads, some of them carved in the shape of animal heads. Settlements in the steppes contemporary with Suvorovo, such as Sredni Stog II and Dereivka on the Dnieper River, contained 12%-52% horse bones.

When Suvorovo graves appeared in the Danube delta grasslands, horse-head maces also appeared in some of the indigenous farming towns of the Tripolye and Gumelnitsa cultures in present-day Romania and Moldova, near the Suvorovo graves. These agricultural cultures had not previously used polished-stone maces, and horse bones were rare or absent in their settlement sites.

Probably their horse-head maces came from the Suvorovo immigrants. The Suvorovo people in turn acquired many copper ornaments from the Tripolye and Gumelnitsa towns. After this episode of contact and trade, but still during the period 4200-4000 BCE, about 600 agricultural towns in the Balkans and the lower Danube valley, some of which had been occupied for 2000 years, were abandoned.

Copper mining ceased in the Balkan copper mines, and the cultural traditions associated with the agricultural towns were terminated in the Balkans and the lower Danube valley. This collapse of “Old Europe” has been attributed to the immigration of mounted Indo-European warriors. The collapse could have been caused by intensified warfare, for which there is some evidence; and warfare could have been worsened by mounted raiding; and the horse-head maces have been interpreted as indicating the introduction of domesticated horses and riding just before the collapse.

However, mounted raiding is just one possible explanation for this complex event. Environmental deterioration, ecological degradation from millennia of farming, and the exhaustion of easily mined oxide copper ores also are cited as causal factors.

Around 3500–3000 BCE, horse bones began to appear more frequently in archaeological sites beyond their center of distribution in the Eurasian steppes and were seen in central Europe, the middle and lower Danube valley, and the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia. Evidence of horses in these areas had been rare before, and as numbers increased, larger animals also began to appear in horse remains.

This expansion in range was contemporary with the Botai culture, where there are indications that horses were corralled and ridden. Some of the most intriguing evidence of early domestication comes from the Botai culture, found in northern Kazakhstan. The Botai culture was a culture of foragers who seem to have adopted horseback riding in order to hunt the abundant wild horses of northern Kazakhstan between 3500–3000 BCE.

Botai sites had no cattle or sheep bones; the only domesticated animals, in addition to horses, were dogs. Botai settlements in this period contained between 50–150 pit houses. Garbage deposits contained tens to hundreds of thousands of discarded animal bones, 65% to 99% of which had come from horses. Also, there has been evidence found of horse milking at these sites, with horse milk fats soaked into pottery shards dating to 3500 BCE. Earlier hunter-gatherers who lived in the same region had not hunted wild horses with such success, and lived for millennia in smaller, more shifting settlements, often containing less than 200 wild animal bones.

Entire herds of horses were slaughtered by the Botai hunters, apparently in hunting drives. The adoption of horseback riding might explain the appearance of specialized horse-hunting techniques and larger, more permanent settlements. Domesticated horses could have been adopted from neighboring herding societies in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains, where the Khvalynsk culture had herds of cattle and sheep, and perhaps had domesticated horses, as early as 4800 BCE.

Other researchers have argued that all of the Botai horses were wild, and that the horse-hunters of Botai hunted wild horses on foot. As evidence, they note that zoologists have found no skeletal changes in the Botai horses that indicate domestication. Moreover, because they were hunted for food, the majority of the horse remains found in Botai-culture settlements indeed probably were wild. On the other hand, any domesticated riding horses were probably the same size as their wild cousins and cannot now be distinguished by bone measurements.

They also note that the age structure of the horses slaughtered at Botai represents a natural demographic profile for hunted animals, not the pattern expected if they were domesticated and selected for slaughter. However, these arguments were published prior to the discovery of a corral at Krasnyi Yar and mats of horse-dung at two other Botai sites.

This does not necessarily mean that horses were first domesticated in the steppes, but the horse-hunters of the steppes certainly pursued wild horses more than in any other region. This geographic expansion is interpreted by many zoologists as an early phase in the spread of domesticated horses.

European wild horses were hunted for up to 10% of the animal bones in a handful of Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements scattered across Spain, France, and the marshlands of northern Germany, but in many other parts of Europe, including Greece, the Balkans, the British Isles, and much of central Europe, horse bones do not occur or occur very rarely in Mesolithic, Neolithic or Chalcolithic sites. In contrast, wild horse bones regularly exceeded 40% of the identified animal bones in Mesolithic and Neolithic camps in the Eurasian steppes, west of the Ural Mountains.

Horse bones were rare or absent in Neolithic and Chalcolithic kitchen garbage in western Turkey, Mesopotamia, most of Iran, South and Central Asia, and much of Europe. While horse bones have been identified in Neolithic sites in central Turkey, all equids together totaled less than 3% of the animal bones.

Within this three percent, horses were less than 10%, with 90% or more of the equids represented by onagers (Equus hemionus) or another ass-like equid that later became extinct, Equus Hydruntinus. Onagers were the most common native wild equids of the Near East. They were hunted in Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia; and domesticated asses (Equus asinus) were imported into Mesopotamia, probably from Egypt, but wild horses apparently did not live there.

Later, images of horses, identified by their short ears, flowing manes, and tails that bushed out at the dock, began to appear in artistic media in Mesopotamia during the Akkadian period, 2300-2100 BCE. The word for “horse”, literally translated as ass of the mountains, first appeared in Sumerian documents during the Third Dynasty of Ur, about 2100-2000 BCE.

The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur apparently fed horses to lions for royal entertainment, perhaps indicating that horses were still regarded as more exotic than useful, but King Shulgi, about 2050 BCE, compared himself to “a horse of the highway that swishes its tail”, and one image from his reign showed a man apparently riding a horse at full gallop. Horses were imported into Mesopotamia and the lowland Near East in larger numbers after 2000 BCE in connection with the beginning of chariot warfare.

A further expansion, into the lowland Near East and northwestern China, also happened around 2000 BCE, again apparently in conjunction with the chariot. Although ‘’Equus’’ bones of uncertain species are found in some Late Neolithic sites in China dated before 2000 BCE, ‘’Equus caballus’’ or ‘’Equus ferus’’ bones first appeared in multiple sites and in significant numbers in sites of the Qijia and Siba cultures, 2000-1600 BCE, in Gansu and the northwestern provinces of China.

The Qijia culture was in contact with cultures of the Eurasian steppes, as shown through similarities between Qijia and Late Bronze Age steppe metallurgy, so it was probably through these contacts that domesticated horses first became frequent in northwestern China.

Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the mid-4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia, Indus Valley(Moenjodaro), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, so that the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle remains unresolved and under debate. The world’s oldest wooden wheel, dating from 5,250 ± 100 BP, was discovered by Slovenian archeologists in 2002.

The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon—four wheels, two axles), is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BC clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.

The wheeled vehicle spread from the area of its first occurrence (Mesopotamia, Caucasus, Balkans, Central Europe) across Eurasia, reaching the Indus Valley by the 3rd millennium BC. During the 2nd millennium BC, the spoke-wheeled chariot spread at an increased pace, reaching both China and Scandinavia by 1200 BC.

In China, the wheel was certainly present with the adoption of the chariot in c. 1200 BC, although Barbieri-Low argues for earlier Chinese wheeled vehicles, c. 2000 BC.

The chariot is a type of carriage using animals (almost always horses) to provide rapid motive power. Chariots were used for war as “battle taxis” and mobile archery platforms, as well as more peaceable pursuits such as hunting or racing for sport, and as a chief vehicle of many ancient peoples, when speed of travel was desired rather than how much weight could be carried.

The original chariot was a fast, light, open, two-wheeled conveyance drawn by two or more horses that were hitched side by side. It was little more than a floor with a waist-high semicircular guard in front. The chariot, driven by a charioteer, was used for ancient warfare during the bronze and the iron ages. Armor was limited to a shield. The vehicle was used for travel, in processions, games, and races after it had been superseded by other vehicles for military purposes.

The word “chariot” comes from Latin carrus, which was a loan from Gaulish. A chariot of war or of triumph was called a car. In ancient Rome and other ancient Mediterranean countries a biga required two horses, a triga three, and a quadriga required four horses abreast. Obsolete terms for chariot include chair, charet and wain.

The critical invention that allowed the construction of light, horse-drawn chariots for use in battle was the spoked wheel.

The earliest spoke-wheeled chariots date to ca. 2000 BC and their use peaked around 1300 BC (see Battle of Kadesh). Chariots ceased to have military importance in the 4th century BC, but chariot races continued to be popular in Constantinople until the 6th century AD.

The earliest fully developed true chariots known are from the chariot burials of the Andronovo (Timber-Grave) sites of the Sintashta-Petrovka Proto-Indo-Iranian culture in modern Russia and Kazakhstan from around 2000 BC. This culture is at least partially derived from the earlier Yamna culture. It built heavily fortified settlements, engaged in bronze metallurgy on an industrial scale and practiced complex burial rituals reminiscent of rituals known from the Rigveda and the Avesta.

The Sintashta-Petrovka chariot burials yield the earliest spoke-wheeled true chariots. The Andronovo culture over the next few centuries spread across the steppes from the Urals to the Tien Shan, likely corresponding to early Indo-Iranian cultures.

Chariots figure prominently in the Rigveda, evidencing their presence in India in the 2nd millennium BC. Among Rigvedic deities, notably Ushas (the dawn) rides in a chariot, as well as Agni in his function as a messenger between gods and men.

Chariots figure prominently in Indo-Iranian mythology. Chariots are also important in Hindu and Persian mythologies, in which deities are portrayed as a charioteer.

The oldest testimony of chariot warfare in the ancient Near East is the Old Hittite Anitta text (18th century BC), which mentions 40 teams of horses at the siege of Salatiwara. Since the text mentions teams rather than chariots, the existence of chariots in the 18th century BC is uncertain. The first certain attestation of chariots in the Hittite empire dates to the late 17th century BC (Hattusili I). A Hittite horse-training text is attributed to Kikkuli the Mitanni (15th century BC).

The Hittites were renowned charioteers. They developed a new chariot design that had lighter wheels, with four spokes rather than eight, and that held three rather than two warriors. It could hold three warriors because the wheel was placed in the middle of the chariot and not at the back as in the Egyptian chariots. Hittite prosperity largely depended on Hittite control of trade routes and natural resources, specifically metals.

As the Hittites gained dominion over Mesopotamia, tensions flared among the neighboring Assyrians, Hurrians, and Egyptians. Under Suppiluliuma I, the Hittites conquered Kadesh and, eventually, the whole of Syria. The Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BC is likely to have been the largest chariot battle ever fought, involving some five thousand chariots.

The chariot and horse were introduced to Egypt by the Hyksos invaders in the 16th century BC and undoubtedly contributed to the military success of the Egyptians. In the remains of Egyptian and Assyrian art, there are numerous representations of chariots, which display rich ornamentation. The chariots of the Egyptians and Assyrians, with whom the bow was the principal arm of attack, were richly mounted with quivers full of arrows. The Egyptians invented the yoke saddle for their chariot horses in c. 1500 BC. The best preserved examples of Egyptian chariots are the four specimens from the tomb of Tutankhamun.Chariots can be carried by two or more horses.

The Persians succeeded Elam in the mid 1st millennium. They may have been the first to yoke four horses (rather than two) to their chariots. They also used scythed chariots. Cyrus the Younger employed these chariots in large numbers.

Herodotus mentions that the Libyans and the Indus satrapy supplied cavalry and chariots to Xerxes the Great’s army. However, by this time cavalry was far more effective and agile than the chariot, and the defeat of Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela (331 BC), where the army of Alexander simply opened their lines and let the chariots pass and attacked them from behind, marked the end of the era of chariot warfare.

The earliest records of chariots are the arsenal inventories of the Mycenaean palaces, as described in Linear B tablets from the 15th-14th centuries BC. The tablets distinguish between “assembled” and “disassembled” chariots.

Herodotus reports that chariots were widely used in the Pontic-Caspian steppe by the Sigynnae.

The domestication of the horse was an important step toward civilization, and the clearest evidence of early use of the horse as a means of transport is from chariot burials dated c. 2000 BC. An increasing amount of evidence supports the hypothesis that horses were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes (Dereivka centered in Ukraine) approximately 4000-3500 BC. Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the mid 4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) Central Europe and Mesopotamia.

The earliest depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here, a wagon with two axles and four wheels), is on the Bronocice pot, a ca. 3500–3350 BC clay pot excavated in a funnelbeaker settlement in southern Poland. In the Armenian Kingdom of Van (Urartu), the chariot was used by both the nobility and the military. In Erebuni (Yerevan), Armenia King Argishti of Urartu is depicted riding on a chariot which is dragged by two horses. The chariot has two wheels and each wheel has about eight spokes. This type of chariot was used around 800 BC.

The Trundholm sun chariot is dated to c. 1400 BC (see Nordic Bronze Age). The horse drawing the solar disk runs on four wheels, and the Sun itself on two. All wheels have four spokes. The “chariot” comprises the solar disk, the axle, and the wheels, and it is unclear whether the sun is depicted as the chariot or as the passenger. Nevertheless, the presence of a model of a horse-drawn vehicle on two spoked wheels in Northern Europe at such an early time is astonishing.

In addition to the Trundholm chariot, there are numerous petroglyphs, from the Nordic Bronze Age, that depict chariots. One petroglyph, drawn on a stone slab in a double burial from c. 1000 BC, depicts a biga with two four-spoked wheels.

The use of the composite bow in chariot warfare is not attested in northern Europe.

The Celts were famous chariot makers, and the English word car is believed to be derived, via Latin carrum, from Gaulish karros (the English chariot is derived from the 13th century French charriote). Some 20 iron-aged chariot burials have been excavated in Britain, roughly dating from between 500 BC and 100 BC. Virtually all of them were found in East Yorkshire, with the exception of one find in 2001 in Newbridge, 10 km west of Edinburgh.

The earliest archaeological evidence of chariots in China, a chariot burial site discovered in 1933 at Hougang, Anyang in Henan province, dates to the rule of King Wu Ding of the late Shang Dynasty (c. 1200 BC). Oracle bone inscriptions suggest that the western enemies of the Shang used limited numbers of chariots in battle, but the Shang themselves used them only as mobile command vehicles and in royal hunts.