The Coming of the Greeks
larger than an onager or an ass) was unable to draw efficiently
a load of more than a quarter of a ton.
Until the development of light vehicles, equids were of only
marginal utility as draft animals. Onagers pulled both two-
wheeled carts (see Fig. 2) and four-wheeled wagons in third-
millennium Mesopotamia, but a team of four onagers was re-
quired to draw the bulky wagon then in use. The Ur Standard
(see Fig. 3) shows a four-onager team pulling what appears to
be a battlewagon, although it is likely that the wagon was
meant for parade and display rather than for fighting."
Throughout central and northern Eurasia, heavy-wheeled ve-
hicles have been found in third-millennium tombs, but al-
though it is possible that a few of these vehicles were drawn by
horses, the only teams of draft animals found in the tombs are
oxen. 12 Given the limitations on the equid's service as a draft
animal, it is not surprising that the horse had too little value
to be imported into southern Europe and the Near East, where
the climate was too warm for the horse to flourish. At the
southernmost site in the Balkans at which horse bones have
been found in third-millennium levels (Vardarophtsa, in cen-
tral Macedonia), the horse may have been only a game ani-
mal. 13
Horses were rare but not unknown in the Near East in the
fourth and third millennia. Horse bones have been reported
- This is the view, well argued, of A. Salonen, Die Landfahrzeuge
des alten Mesopotamien (Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, vol. 72, fasc.
- (Helsinki, 1951), 163. Salonen notes that in their inscriptions, Sumetian
and Akkadian kings describe their armies only in terms of infantry, never
mentioning the "battle-wagons." For arguments that the vehicles were used
in battle, see Hangar, Das Pferd, 426; see also Littauer and Crouwel,
Wheeled Vehicles, 33.
- S. Piggott, "The Earliest Wheeled Vehicles and the Caucasian
Evidence," 2958!". and map at 303.
- The excavator, W. A. Heurtley, listed horse bones along with
boar, deer, elk, goat, and ox bones. See Heurtley, Prehistoric Macedonia
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1939), 88-93, ar>d F. E. Zeuner, A
History of Domesticated Animals (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 322.
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