The New Warfareseems to have had no military use. In these areas it was what
Piggott 93 has called a "prestige vehicle," used for ceremony,
for recreation, for display, or for a relatively comfortable and
dignified form of rapid transport. The appearance of these non-
military chariots in the Near East, as we have seen, antedates
by at least two centuries the advent of effective chariot warfare.
Where the "chariot" in the broad sense was first developed and
produced is obviously one question, and where chariot warfare
began is another. Both need to be addressed.
It is, perhaps, barely possible that the chariot in the broad
sense—a light vehicle, with two spoked wheels—was invented
somewhere in the vast area, north of the Near East, between
the Carpathian Basin and the Urals. The Pontic steppe (and
other treeless steppes) apparently can be ruled out entirely, 94
but other parts of the koine cannot. The argument in support
of this thesis makes reference to the undeniable facts that the
wild horse was native to the entire area under consideration,
and that by the beginning of the second millennium the do-
mesticated horse was common to all of the cultures found
therein. For a more pointed argument, one can refer to the
handful of sites, scattered over the whole of the horse-breeding
koine that stretched from central Hungary to the Aral Sea,
where bits made from bone or antler have been found in levels
from the early second, the third, and even the fourth millen-
nia. This argument, however, is less conclusive than it may
initially seem, since most of these bits (or, more exactly, these
cheek pieces) can hardly attest to the presence of "chariots" or
any other wheeled vehicle drawn by horses. For example, six
antler bits were found in fourth-millennium levels at Dereivka
(on the Lower Dnieper); but since wheeled vehicles are not at-
tested at so early a date, the bits must have controlled ridden
horses. The direct evidence for early "chariots" in central Eur-
- Piggott, Earliest Wheeled Transport, 90 and 95.
- So Hausler, "Neue Belege zu Geschichte von Rad und Wagen
im nordpontischen Raum."
109