maneuvering diffi cult, but it still allowed two or more ani-
mals to pull together as a team and thus to haul much heavier
loads than ever before. Wheeled vehicles quickly became vital
to the growth of cities, to which supplies had to be carried
from the countryside. By 3000 b.c.e. wheeled carts had be-
come common.
A l s o a rou nd 3 0 0 0 b.c. e. w he e lw r i g ht s a dde d r i m s to t he i r
wheels to reduce wear. At fi rst they simply studded the outer
edges of the wooden wheels with nails. Th is made the solid
wheels more durable, but even heavier. In about 2000 b.c.e.
rims made of bands of copper were introduced. At about the
same time, people discovered that heated wood could be bent.
Th is discovery led to the spoked wheel. Th e rim became a cir-
cle of bent wood protected by a band of copper and connected
to the hub by spokes. Th e fi rst spoked wheels had two wide
spokes. Wheelwrights experimented with diff erent numbers
of narrow spokes, with four- and six-spoked wheels becom-
ing common. Spoked wheels were much lighter than solid
ones and thus allowed greater speed.
Transportation technology advanced still further with the
making of wheels that turned independently of each other and
of the axle. Th is innovation greatly increased maneuverability
(although many simple wagons and farm carts continued to
use the cruder construction of fi xed wheels and axles). Among
other things, the combination of light spoked wheels and in-
dependent rotation led to the development, sometime around
2500 b.c.e., of the chariot. Th is most famous of ancient vehicles
had two wheels and eventually took a wide variety of forms. At
one extreme were light, swift models used for racing or for de-
livering messages. At the other were heavy, armored war chari-
ots that carried, in addition to the driver, archers and lancers.
Neither the improvements to the wheel nor the inven-
tion of the chariot would have meant much without a fast,
strong animal to pull the new vehicles. Th at animal was the
horse. Horses may have been domesticated in Ukraine in the
fourth millennium b.c.e. Although the nomadic peoples of
central Asia rode horses, the animals may not have appeared
in the Near East until about 2500 b.c.e., when Sumerians
hitched them four abreast to pull four-wheeled battlewagons.
Th e value of horses must have been obvious throughout the
region aft er about the 1700s b.c.e., when the Hyksos, a south-
west Asian people who migrated as far as Egypt, used them
to great eff ect in both war and peace. At about the same time,
the Hittites swept down from what is now north-central Tur-
key aboard horse-drawn battle chariots and conquered much
of northern Mesopotamia and modern-day Syria. Th eir en-
emies soon adopted this same lethal combination. When the
Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II fi nally dealt the Hittite Empire
a crushing defeat, at Kadesh, in Syria, about 1275 b.c.e., it was
in one of the greatest horse-and-chariot battles of all time.
Of all the people of the ancient Near East the Persians
may have made best peacetime use of the horse’s potential.
Persian rulers created a large network of roads to connect
their empire, including the Royal Road, which spanned the
Near East from the city of Susa near the Persian Gulf to thecity of Sardis near the Aegean, covering 1,600 miles. Th e Per-
sians developed a system of way stations where horses could be
cared for and exchanged, allowing messengers to cover about
180 miles a day, riding from Susa to Sardis in nine days—a
rate of travel unheard of at the time. Although it was not as
fast as the horse, the mule—a cross between a female horse
and a male donkey—contributed greatly to transportation as
both a pack animal and a draft animal. Mules tolerated heat
and cold well, had tough hides, and could carry heavier loads
than donkeys could. Th e Sumerians were using mules by the
third millennium b.c.e.
For long-distance travel in the desert, however, neither
horses nor mules could compete with a later arrival in the
Near East, the camel, which was far better adapted to hot,
dry conditions. Th e one-humped dromedary was probably
domesticated in Arabia around 1200–1100 b.c.e., quickly
revolutionizing long-distance trade. Camel caravans made it
possible to transport aromatics like frankincense and myrrh
from the southern Arabian kingdoms northward to Meso-
potamia, Syria, and the Levant. In Iran two-humped Bac-
trian camels were used for similar purposes. Th ese animals
originated in the Mongolian area, but by the third millen-
nium b.c.e. they had reached the Iranian plateau. In addition,
dromedary-Bactrian hybrids were being bred by the early sec-
ond millennium b.c.e. Th ese animals became the heavy-duty
trucks of antiquity, capable of carrying loads of half a ton and
with far greater tolerance of extremes of heat and cold than
either purebred dromedaries or Bactrians.
Inland water travel was rare in the Near East except
on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Both rivers posed prob-
lems for people who traveled on them, because they tended
to fi ll with silt as well as to jump their banks periodically to
forge new courses to the sea. By the Early Dynastic Period
(ca. 2900–ca. 2340 b.c.e.) barges moved up and down theseAchaemenid Persian gold model chariot dating to the fi ft h to fourth
century b.c.e. from the region of Takht-i Kuwad, Tadjikistan (© Th e
Trustees of the British Museum)1114 transportation: The Middle East0895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i1114 1114 10/10/07 2:31:08 PM