but not all, had a wheel gauge somewhat narrower than that of chariots in the Late
Bronze Age) and served only as vehicles destined for the Underworld.^71 That the
carts had no practical utility in the world of the living, however, is difficult to
accept. Like the other goods placed in the grave, the horses and “chariot” should
have been of some service or value to the deceased during his lifetime. Stated
another way, if a rich man had not driven the “chariot” for rapid transport during
his lifetime the mourners would not have done him much of a favor by sending
it (and a team of horses) along with him to the Underworld.
Essential for building a light cart was the steam-bending of wood. Most
obviously, the felloes that rimmed the wheels had to be bent in order to form a
circle. How much more steam-bending was done for the spoke-wheeled carts at
Krivoe Ozero and Sintashta is unknown. In the Late Bronze Age steam-bending
was required to produce the spokes, the yoke, and even—most difficult of all—
the yoke-pole. The art of steam-bending wood had long been known: shafts of
arrows had been steam-straightened already in the Neolithic period, and in Egypt
wood was being steam-bent for various purposes by the end of the Fifth Dynasty
(so ca. 2400 BC).^72 The technical aspects of bending wood for a chariot have been
recently and vividly illustrated in a television documentary produced by Martin
O’Collins.^73
Organic bits of the kind used in the Sintashta-Petrovka culture soon became
widespread on the steppe. Studded disk cheekpieces, closely resembling those from
Sintashta, have recently been found in Tajikistan, some 1300 miles southeast of
Sintashta.^74 Importantly for our purposes, bits of the same kind have been found
in Romania and—as now is well known^75 —two pairs were also included in the
corredo of Shaft Grave IV at Mycenae. Most of the early specimens that have
been recovered, usually from burials, come from the Sintashta cultural area
westward to the forest steppe along the upper Don.^76 That the bit and the spoke-
wheeled cart were soon adopted over so vast an area on the steppe indicates how
important and exciting these innovations were in the horse’s natural habitat. The
building of a spoke-wheeled cart of course required long labor and skilled
craftsmanship, and although horses may have been cheap a chariot was not. In
the second millennium BCthe average man on the steppe may have been well
acquainted with chariots but did not own one. In the SM cemetery at Sintashta
were forty graves, of which seven included a “chariot” burial,^77 and even that
percentage may be misleadingly high. From the entire steppe only several dozen
cheekpieces have been discovered in Bronze Age contexts.
The chariot for recreation and display in the Near East
The first tamed horses in the Near East seem to have been ridden—without a saddle,
and controlled only by a line attached to a nose-ring—and driving was much safer
than riding. Spoke-wheeled vehicles had come into use in at least parts of the Near
East by the nineteenth century BC, and initially the draft horses too were controlled
with nose-rings rather than with bits. The earliest depictions of draft horses show
them pulling a proper chariot, the driver standing rather than sitting.^78 A sealing
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 45