The earliest known chariots come from graves on the Ural steppe
Burials of the Sintashta culture, which flourished in the Southern Urals from about 2200 BCE, hold the oldest chariots yet found, making it a leading candidate for where that technology began. Its people are also widely regarded as the source of the Indo-Iranian languages, later spoken from Anatolia to India.
Named after a site in Russia's Chelyabinsk Oblast, the culture stretched into Orenburg, Bashkortostan and northern Kazakhstan, and forms the first phase of the Sintashta-Petrovka complex. It was only separated from the Andronovo culture in the 1990s, because its remains lie hidden beneath later settlements. Its origins are debated: the archaeologist Koryakova argued in 1998 for a blend of the Poltavka and Abashevo cultures, while a 2015 genetic study by Allentoft and colleagues pointed to an eastward migration of Corded Ware peoples.
Climate set the stage. The already arid Kazakh steppe grew colder and drier, making the marshy lowlands along the Ural and upper Tobol rivers vital, and herders settled permanently in river-valley strongholds. Twenty-three fortified settlements are known, each estimated at 200 to 700 people living on cattle, sheep, goats and horses. The intensity of their copper mining and bronze working is unusual for a steppe society.
Warfare was endemic, and competition for resources drove fortification on an unprecedented scale along with military innovations such as the war chariot. Many graves hold weapons, and high-status ones add chariots, axes and mace-heads; lavish sacrifices may reflect rivals trying to outdo one another, somewhat like the potlatch of North America. Arrows were short, 50 to 70 cm, tipped with stone or bone rather than metal.
The language link rests chiefly on resemblances between Sintashta funeral rites, as excavated, and passages of the Rigveda, hymns preserved in Vedic Sanskrit; David Anthony suggested in 2007 that these people probably spoke Common Indo-Iranian. From this base, Indo-Iranian speakers later spread toward Anatolia, the Iranian plateau and the Indian subcontinent, and some cultural parallels have even been noted in the Nordic Bronze Age.
Source: Sintashta culture
