correct, of course, but instead of weakening the thesis that the chariot appeared
first on the steppe they strengthen a very different conclusion: that everywhere—
on the steppe as well as in the Near East—the safe and effective riding of horses
followed rather than preceded the driving of horses.
The earliest known artifacts that are certainly cheekpieces were found in
conjunction with the earliest known spoke-wheeled carts. The innovations seem
to have occurred together in the Sintashta-Petrovka cultural area, along the eastern
flank of the southern Urals.^64 In the late 1980s Nikolai Vinogradov, excavating
at Krivoe Ozero in the Chelyabinsk Oblast, found four cheekpieces next to two
horse skulls. This was a “chariot burial”: a burial, that is, of a man accompanied
to the Underworld by a team of draft horses and by a cart with two spoked wheels.
Although the cart itself was not preserved, traces in the soil indicated that it had
wheels with many spokes. If the vehicle was built to accommodate a sitting rather
than a standing passenger, if the box opened toward the front rather than the back,
and if the axle was positioned in the center of the box rather than toward the rear,
the word “chariot” would not quite be appropriate for it. Although the Krivoe Ozero
vehicle was undoubtedly ancestral to the chariot, we may more cautiously call it
a spoke-wheeled cart.^65 Whatever we call it, it clearly was meant for speed rather
than for hauling cargo: drawn by a team of running horses, the cart and its occupant
could probably have reached the breathtaking speed of 25 miles per hour.^66
In 1992 Vinogradov gave Anthony permission to date bone from the two
Krivoe Ozero horse skulls and the calibrated date turned out to be 2270–2030 BC
(the uncalibrated dates were about 300 years later).^67 The Krivoe Ozero “chariot
burial” was not an isolated phenomenon. In the 1970s Vladimir Gening had
excavated five similar burials at Sintashta, 80 miles to the south of Krivoe Ozero.
Traces in the ground showed that the Sintashta carts, like the one buried at Krivoe
Ozero, had many spokes: at least eight, and in one case twelve. Although Gening
originally assigned the spoke-wheeled vehicles at Sintashta to the seventeenth
century BCcarbon dating has put them considerably earlier, and close to 2000
BC.^68 They were found not under a kurgan but in an ordinary cemetery at Sintashta
(SM). Anthony well expresses, however, how extraordinary were the grave goods
in that cemetery. In addition to the spoke-wheeled carts, “the forty SM graves
contained astounding sacrifices that included whole horses, up to eight in and on
a single grave.”^69
The cheekpieces found in the burials at Krivoe Ozero were disk-shaped and
were made from bone. These Scheibenknebelwere necessarily connected by an
organic mouthpiece, perhaps cord or leather, which has disappeared. Ideally, the
driver could stop or brake a horse by pulling back on the reins, thereby pulling
the mouthpiece back against the sensitive corners of the horse’s mouth. In practice,
however, a horse would often work the mouthpiece back from the diastemata to
the pre-molars, clamp them down, and so immobilize the mouthpiece. The
cheekpieces were carved with studs protruding from the inner face.
The same design was followed in the bronze “Hyksos” bits used in the Near
East from ca. 1700 until at least 1300 BC. Littauer and Crouwel described the
studded bronze cheekpieces as appropriate for “driving bits, with the emphasis
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 43