The New Warfarein use in widely scattered communities. 97 Wherever the inven-
tion of the spoked wheel occurred, it very clearly was followed
by a remarkably rapid diffusion of the "chariot," from the Dan-
ube to the Urals, and from the headwaters of the Volga to the
Persian Gulf. 98 That is not to say, of course, that the "chariot"
was a commonplace throughout the entire area. One would
suppose that in the steppe, where domesticated horses were so
plentiful, there were more "chariots" in the eighteenth century
B.C. than there were in Mesopotamia or Syria, but even in the
north it is likely that the "chariot" was at that time a rare and
prestigious vehicle.
Whether it was the technique of chariot manufacture that
was diffused, or whether the vehicles themselves were traded
over long distances from some central region where they were
made is not certain. Probability, however, and the little evi-
dence that we have, both point to the second alternative. Nei-
ther the wood nor (we must suppose) the woodworking skills
necessary for the making of chariots were available in most of
the Eurasian steppe and the Fertile Crescent. If the environ-
ment of the North Pontic steppe in the second millennium
B.C. was roughly the same as in modern times (and there is no
evidence to the contrary), the timber necessary for the manu-
facture of any vehicle—whether wagon, cart, or chariot—
"would have to be sought in either the Woodland Steppe zone
- Kuz'mina, "Stages in the Development of Wheeled Transport
in Central Asia," 120. - In discussing the origins of the tripartite disk wheel, Piggott
(Earliest Wheeled Transport, 63) makes a good case for the "diffusionist" the-
ory, and against the theory of independent indigenous developments
("Switzerland and Sumer can hardly have invented, independently and si-
multaneously, the tri-partite disc wheel around 3000 BC"). By way of anal-
ogy, Piggott points to the rapid diffusion of the riding horse among Ameri-
can Indians, from the Carribean to northwestern Canada, after being
introduced by the Spaniards. The diffusion of the "chariot" through most of
Eurasia was apparently even more rapid than the diffusion of the tripartite
wheel.
Ill