The Coming of the Greeks
basis of the evolution of the wagon types at Lchashen and in
the Trialeti steppe of Georgia, Stuart Piggott made a strong
case that it was here, in the Kura-Araxes culture, that wheeled
vehicles were first used; and that from this region their use
spread to Mesopotamia and to central Anatolia, and eventually
to Europe.II2 Many of these wagons seem to date from the third
millennium, and presumably all were ox-drawn.
In a 1974 study, 113 Piggott turned his attention to the
spoked-wheel vehicles from Lchashen, and to the evidence for
horses at the site. Although complete horse skeletons were not
found, several graves contained "heads-and-hoofs" burials or
hide burials. The principal funerary animal, however, was cer-
tainly the ox, for almost all of the Lchashen graves included
oxen. Aside from the limited skeletal evidence for horses, sev-
eral of the Lchashen graves yielded bronze bits (six of them
from a single barrow) and modeled horses. As for the two
"chariots," obviously horse-drawn, Piggott not only noted
their general similarity to the military chariots of the Near
Eastern Late Bronze Age, but also pointed to remarkable par-
allels between the Lchashen two-wheelers and chariots known
from Shang and Chou Dynasty China. The parallels, Piggott
found, are "too specialized to be dismissed as coincidental,"
and he suggests that the vehicle was brought from Armenia
eastward to Ferghana, possibly by the people known to philol-
chariot from burial' at Lchashen: if 'chariot' is taken literally in a translation
of the original Russian, this would be from Barrow 9 or n, but it could
represent a less specific 'vehicle.' In calibrated form it would be c. 1500
BC."
- Piggott, "Earliest Wheeled Vehicles." In reviewing the Trans-
caucasian evidence in Earliest Wheeled Transport, 66—70, Piggott is some-
what more conservative, noting that a carbon test has dated one of the Tri-
aleti wagons slightly later than the archaeological evidence had suggested.
In this most recent publication, too, however, he sees the Kura-Araxes re-
gion as pivotal in the development of wheeled transport. He notes, for ex-
ample, that in the Trialeti wagons "even the gauge or wheel-track spacing
appears to be settling towards a norm which was to be perpetuated
throughout European antiquity" (ibid., 68).
- Piggott, "Chariots in the Caucasus," 16-24.
