The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

other hand, wheeled vehicles seem to have been considerably
more numerous than they were in the Near East. The land of
the PIE speakers may have been one of many in which owner-
ship of an ox-drawn vehicle was not restricted to the very
wealthy.
The manufacture of wheeled vehicles was more localized
than their use. Although the Sumerians knew both the four-
wheeled wagon and the two-wheeled cart, there is no evidence
that they built the vehicles. As Piggott's Earliest Wheeled
Transport shows, carts and wagons were built in those areas
where oaks and other large hardwood trees were available.
South of the Armenian mountains all such trees were scarce,
and many species did not grow at all; on the mountains of Leb-
anon there were cedars and other conifers, but these are soft-
wood trees. North of the Black Sea, the peoples of the open
steppe presumably had to acquire from forested regions the ve-
hicles of which they were so fond.
It is therefore likely that in the third millennium the PIE
speakers' accomplishments as cartwrights and wainwrights dis-
tinguished them from many other societies. That the PIE
speakers did manufacture wheeled vehicles is indicated by their
vocabulary: the inherited Indo-European terms for wheel,
yoke, wain, axle, and other vehicular elements suggest that the
PIE speakers' self-sufficiency in this respect must have begun
almost at the very beginning of wheeled transport (had it not,
one would expect to find the PIE speakers borrowing words
along with the object for which they stood). If they had neigh-
bors whose lands produced no large hardwood trees, the PIE
speakers would almost certainly have had a specialty of sorts in
the manufacture of ox-drawn vehicles. Such a specialization
may be deduced, but it cannot be demonstrated from the evi-
dence now available.
In summary, there is no reason to think that before the in-
vention of the "chariot" the PIE speakers were unusually de-
pendent upon the domesticated horse. Nor would they have
been remarkable for their use of the ox-drawn vehicle, although