The Coming of the Greeksthe Anatolian sealings mentioned above portray two-wheeled
"chariots" with four-spoked wheels. In addition, a Kiiltepe
cylinder seal (also from the nineteenth century B.C.) shows a
four-wheeled wagon drawn by equids that have been supposed
to be horses, and the wagon's wheels appear to be spoked. At
Chagar Bazar, 150 miles northwest of Ashur and near the head-
waters of the Habur River, terracotta figurines of equids
(again, presumably, horses) were found in a context dating ca.
1800 B.C., and among the figurines was a fragment of a terra-
cotta model of a wheel that is indisputably multispoked. 59 A
slightly later representation of a spoked wheel occurs in a seal
impression on a clay tablet from Sippar, 60 the tablet dating
from the fourteenth year of Hammurabi's reign (1779 B.C.).
The Akkadian word for spoke (tirtttu) is a loan-word, borrowed
from some people outside Mesopotamia. On the other hand, in
texts from the eighteenth century B.C., the word used for the
horse-drawn "chariot" was narkabtu, the same Akkadian word
that in earlier centuries had been used for any two-wheeled
cart. 61
From shortly after 1800 B.C., Akkadian texts at Chagar Ba-
zar refer to more than a score of horses (in a variety of three-
- See Hangar, Das Pferd, plate 238 for the cylinder seal, and Plate
26A for the terracotta model. Lefebvre des Noettes, La force motrice, 13—18,
dated this cylinder seal to the middle of the third millennium, and so could
not observe that the spoked wheel was a fairly late innovation in Mesopota-
mian history. - H. H. Figulla, Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the
British Museum XLVII (London: British Museum, 1967), no. 22, plate 14.
Cf. Moorey, "Earliest Near Eastern Spoked Wheels," 431, and Littauer and
Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles, fig. 31 and 51. - A. Salonen, "Notes on Wagons and Chariots in Ancient Meso-
potamia," Studia Orientalia 14, 2 (Helsinki: Societas Orientalis Fennica,
1950), t-8. Salonen points out (p. 6) that since narkabtu originally referred
to any two-wheeled cart, the precise term for a war chariot was narkabat
tahazi; another two-wheeled vehicle, manifestly unsuited for warfare, was
the narkabat shepa. In conventional usage of the later periods, however,
"narkabtu" regularly stood for the war chariot.
98