The spoked wheel made the war chariot possible
A chariot was barely more than a floor on two wheels with a waist-high rail, pulled by horses harnessed side by side. What made it fast enough to reshape Bronze Age warfare was a lighter kind of wheel: spokes instead of solid discs. Tutankhamun took four chariots into his tomb.
The oldest known examples come from burials of the Sintashta culture in what is now Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia, dated to roughly 1950 to 1880 BC, and cylinder seals from Kültepe in central Anatolia show chariots around 1900 BC. Not everyone agrees the Sintashta vehicles qualify; some specialists class them as carts. Archaeologist Joost Crouwel argues chariots evolved gradually from earlier vehicles on disc or cross-bar wheels, a sequence best traced in the Near East. Indo-Iranian peoples spread them along with associated cults and rituals, and Indo-Aryans brought horses and chariots into India.
An eighteenth-century BC Hittite text mentions 40 horse teams at a siege, though it is unclear whether chariots were involved; firm Hittite evidence appears in the late seventeenth century BC. The Hittites became famous charioteers, building vehicles with light four-spoked wheels set near the centre for balance, wide enough to carry a driver, an archer and a shield-bearer. Such machines clashed on a vast scale at the Battle of Kadesh between Hittites and Egyptians, around 1274 BC.
Egypt acquired the chariot around 1650 BC with the Hyksos invaders. Egyptians treated it as a mobile shooting platform crewed by two, a driver on the reins and an archer, and around 1500 BC they devised the yoke saddle harness. By the seventh century BC the Neo-Assyrians fielded heavy chariots with a crew of four and teams of three or four horses, as carved on palace walls at Nimrud and Nineveh. That growing bulk helped tip Near Eastern armies toward cavalry, which eventually replaced chariots.
Chariots did not vanish; they carried travellers, led processions and raced in games. Romans called a two-horse team a biga, three a triga and four a quadriga. Persia used them from the second millennium BC, and later Persian armies fielded scythed chariots with a lone driver. The English word descends from Latin carrus via French, borrowed from Gaulish karros.
Source: Chariot
