The New Warfare
headstall cannot be detected in such miniatute scenes, it is
probable that the reins were attached to a bit. 56
The obvious prerequisite for a fast-moving cart was the
spoked wheel. In Europe and in the Near East, wheels were
invariably solid disks during the third millennium, but early
in the second millennium spoked wheels began to appear. 57
Since disk wheels were very heavy (a wheel with a one-meter
diameter typically weighed well over a hundred pounds), the
development of a spoked wheel was a historic innovation. Al-
though we do not know how the earliest spokes were con-
structed, the spoked wheels of the Late Bronze Age required
expert and sophisticated woodworking, with both the felloes
and the spokes being bent from heated wood. 58
From Cappadocia and from Chagar Bazar in northeastern
Syria come our earliest depictions of the spoked wheel. Both of
- Littauer and Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles, 61 and figs 33, 34, and
- The authors discussed the dates of these Syrian sealings and seal with
Professors Edith Porada and Briggs Buchanan and concluded that all three
belonged "to the iSth-iyth centuries B.C." (Wheeled Vehicles, 51, with n.
14). For the classification, see B. Buchanan, Ancient Near Eastern Seals in the
Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), i65ff., and Pora-
da's review of that book in Bibliotheca Orientalis 27 (1970): 13. For a com-
prehensive study of bits in the ancient Near East, see H. A. Potratz, Die
Pferdetrensen des Alien Orient (Rome: Pont. 1st. Stud. Or., 1966).
- In several discussions of the subject, a third-millennium cylinder
seal from Tepe Hissar, in northwestern Iran, is described as depicting a
spoked wheel. The "spokes" on the Tepe Hissar seal, however, look very
much like the slats that held together the solid wooden wheels found in
third-millennium levels at Susa. Cf. P.R.S. Moorey, "The Earliest Near
Eastern Spoked Wheels and their Chronology," PPS 34 (1968): 430—32.
- Littauer and Crouwel, Wheeled Vehicles, 79: "To form the spoke,
a single piece of wood, somewhat more than twice the length of each spoke
and half its thickness, was bent sharply at the nave, turning back at a 90°
angle (on four-spoked wheels) or a 60° angle (on six-spoked ones) to form
the complementary halves of sister spokes, these sections being glued back
to back the length of the spoke." Wet rawhide was bound around the
spoke-halves at the nave, and as the rawhide dried it bound the halves
tightly together. Finally, the rawhide was covered with lashings made of
birch bark, which waterproofed the spoke.
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