have worn such bits, one can only suggest that something in the grass or soil (or
simply the salt which is necessary to every herbivore’s diet) available to those
donkeys would have reacted chemically with their bits.56 For clay models of carts and wagons found at Tell Brak see Fig. 8 in Clutton-Brock
and Davies 1993.
57 So argued by Littauer and Crouwel 2001.
58 In reporting the copper bit found in a donkey’s skull at Tel Haror, Bar-Oz et al. 2013
state that “harnessing of a donkey with a bridling system was so far unknown.”
59 Littauer and Crouwel 1979, p. 96.
60 Drews 2004, pp. 85–86.
61 See Epimachov and Korjakova 2004, p. 221: “Stichhaltige Belege für den bronze -
zeitlichen eurasischen Streitwagen gibt es erst zeit relative kurzer Zeit. In den 1970er
Jahren stiess man in den Gräberfelden von Sintašta erstmals auf Funde (Gening 1977),
die diese Bestandteile in verschiedenen Kombinationen aufwiesen.”
62 See Anthony 2007, p. 397:
There is disagreement as to the number of clearly identified chariot graves because
the spoke imprints are faint, but even the conservative estimate yields sixteen
chariot graves in nine cemeteries. All belonged to either the Sintashta culture in
the Ural-Tobol steppes or the Petrovka culture east of Sintashta to northern
Kazakhstan. Petrovka was contemporary with late Sintashta, perhaps 1900–1750
BC, and developed directly from it.63 Littauer and Crouwel 1996a. For their earlier argument that the chariot was a Near
Eastern invention, and was not brought into the Near East from the steppe, see Littauer
and Crouwel 1979, pp. 68–71. Although Crouwel and Raulwing have carried on
Littauer’s advocacy of a Near Eastern origin of the chariot, other scholars have
proselytized to the steppe. In his early years Wolfram Nagel published a monograph
arguing that the Near Eastern chariot evolved locally, but in a long article in 2006 Nagel
argued that “der klassische Streitwagen” came from the southern Urals. Compare Nagel
1966 with Eder and Nagel 2006. Harding 2005 recognized that the chariots belonging
to the Shaft Grave Mycenaeans seem to have come not from the Near East but from
the forest steppe.
64 Kuz’mina 2007, pp. 115–131, provides the most exhaustive description, typology and
tabulation of the organic cheekpieces from the steppe and from Mycenaean Greece.
65 Karlene Jones-Bley prefers to call these Sintashta vehicles “carts” rather than “chariots.”
She is probably right that they were too unwieldy to have been of military value, and
she may be right that those found in the graves had somehow been used to transport
(sitting?) corpses to the graves. It is unlikely, however, that the carts were built only
to serve as hearses: the people of ancient Sintashta were surely imaginative enough to
see that a rapidly moving cart could be of some use or entertainment for the living.
Nor can I agree with Jones-Bley that the Sintashta vehicles were not the ancestors of
chariots but were “imitations of vehicles found in the Near East” (Jones-Bley 2000,
p. 139).
66 Herold 2004, pp. 138–139, on the basis of the chariot reconstructed at Hildesheim,
estimated that in New Kingdom Egypt a chariot could be driven at a speed between
25–30 km/h without any problem. As for the top speed, estimating the horsepower and
the weight of the vehicle and two passengers, “dann mögen 30–40 km/h für ein ägyp -
tisches Streitwagengespann auch über längere Distanzen gar nicht so unwahrscheinlich
sein.”
67 See Anthony and Vinogradov 1995; and Anthony 2007 p. 500, note 2.
68 On the widely varying carbon dates from various Sintashta kurgans and cemeteries
see Anthony 2007, pp. 374–375 and his Table 15.1 on pp. 376–377. See also Kuznetsov
The Kurgan theory and taming of horses 53