Invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles, c.4000-3700 BC

“the present evidence for early wheeled transport does not support the traditional belief in the oriental invention of wheel and wagon. Full-size wheels and axles from central and eastern Europe clearly pre-date the earliest wheels from the Near East, and the indirect evidence )models, depictions) does not allow for a temporal gradient indicating diffusion ex oriente. Two alternative hypotheses remain. Innovation could have happened roughly simultaneously, but independently, in several regions (the polycentric model). … Alternatively, there was only one innovation centre. Following Maran (2004b), the late Tripolye culture (around 3700-3500 BC) in the steppe area north-west of the Pontic Sea is the most likely candidate for inventing wheeled transport, and the steppe cultures north of the Black Sea show well-documented relations to south-eastern Europe. Further eastward, future research is needed o clarify the contacts between the late Tripolye and Maikop cultures, but the latter may have played a crucial role in transferring the wagon techno-complex to Mesopotamia )Maran 2004b, 438).

The deposition of wooden wagons in graves continued with the Yamnaya (Pit Grave) culture (c.3200-2500 BC), which, according to Russian archaeological tradition, is clearly Bronze Age. A considerable number of remarkably well preserved wagon burials in huge mounds (kurgans) have been excavated between Kuban, the lower Don, and the southern Ural mountains (Gej 2004; Tureckij 2004), dating between 3200 and 2500 BC (Tureckij 2004, 197).”

Fowler, C. ed., The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe, 2015, p.113.


“the answer to the important question - who did the PIE [Proto-Indo-European] speakers get their wheeled vehicles from? - can be answered with fair certainty: from themselves. In my view, it was PIE-speakers who invented the wheeled vehicle.

Until recently, it has been assumed that the wheeled vehicle was invented in the Late Uruk culture of Mesopotamia c.3500-3300 BCE. However, wheeled vehicle finds of comparable date have been made not only in West Asia but also in many places in Europe. Furthermore, Johannes Renger (2004) and Josef Maran (2004b) observe that the marshlands of Sumer were not favorable terrain for wheeled vehicles; sledges would have worked in ordinary life much better than wheeled vehicles in marshy Mesopotamia, and indeed stayed in use there long after the Late Uruk period. It is true that the Uruk pictograms show sledges with four wheels; however, these “wheels” may depict rolling logs over which the sledges ran. Logs rolling beneath sledges were probably the initial stage in the invention of the wheel for carts and wagons (Littauer and Crouwel 1979).

Maran (2004) suggests the Late Tripolye culture [Ukraine] as the most likely place of origin for wheeled vehicles. Late Tripolye is the only culture to show evidence of wagons predating 3500 BCE (Burmeister 2004), in the form of drinking cups provided with rotating model wheels and with ox foreparts protruding from the front of the cup. In addition to these wagon-shaped drinking cups, there are numerous Late Tripolye drinking cups in the shape of an ox-pulled sledge, which is thought to be the immediate predecessor of the ox-pulled wagon.

Between 4000 and 3400 BCE, the Late Tripolye culture was the most thriving and populous agricultural community in the the entire Copper Age world, cultivating extremely fertile black soil, in villages covering hundreds of hectares and housing up to 15,000 people. These agriculturalist people needed transport, whether by sledge of wheeled wagon. The local forest-steppe provided enough trees for the construction of primitive solid wheels but also sufficient open and level fields for the movement of wheeled traffic, unlike the forested and hilly landscape that covered most of Europe.

I am connecting Maran’s hypothesis that wheeled were invented in the Late Tripolye culture with the hypothesis that the Tripolye culture was taken over by PIE speakers by c.4000 BCE. The PIE speakers would have largely assimilated the earlier Tripolye population linguistically by the time wheeled vehicles were invented, probably c.3600 BC. The location of the Late Tripolye culture makes sense as the geographical center for the spread of the wheeled vehicles; it is also very near the middle of the IE-speaking area and is a good candidate for being the Late PIE homeland from this point of view.

Vehicle technology was probably transmitted to West Asia from the Tripolye culture via the Caucasus, where the Pontic-Caspian and West Asian cultural spheres interacted with each other during the fourth millennium BCE. From both the south and the north there was great interest in possessing the copper resources of the Caucasus. this led to the formation of the south Caucasian Kura-Araxes culture and the north Caucasian Maikop culture (c.3950-3300 BCE). While the Kura-Araxes culture continued the local traditions with heavy influence of the Uruk expansion from Mesopotamia, the Maikop culture has long been considered a splendid mixture of the steppe and West Asian traditions. The pastoralists of the east European steppes had received their copper mainly from the Balkans during the Copper Age, but after the collapse of the Balkano-Carpathian “metallurgical domain”, around, 4000 BCE, the Caucasus became their main source of metal during the Early and Middle Bronze Age (Chernykh 1992; 2007). Out of the approximately 300 graves belonging to the last phase (c.3500-3300 BCE) of the Maikop culture, two elite burials under a barrow contain a wagon, one at Starokorsuskaya in the Kuban steppe [southern Russia], the other at Koldyri on the Lower River Don. From the immediately succeeding Novotitarovskaya culture (c.3300-2800 BCE) of the Kuban steppe, 116 wagon graves are known. the wagons apparently reached the Caucasus from the west, from the forest-steppe region between the Prut and the Bug rivers. Several clay models of wheels are known from the associated post-Tripolye phase C2 sites.

Mallory leaves the origin of wheeled vehicles open but comments:

‘Tomas Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov [1995] … have noted that … Proto-Indo-European *kʷékʷlo-bears striking similarity to the words for vehicles in Sumerian gigir, semitic *galgal-, and Kartvelian *grgar. With the putative origin of wheeled vehicles set variously to the Pontic-Caspian, Transcaucasia or to Sumer, we may be witnessing the original word for a wheeled vehicle in four different language families. Furthermore, as the Proto-Indo-European form is built on an Indo-European verbal root *kʷel-, “to turn, to twist”, it is unlikely that the Indo-Europeans borrowed their word from one of the other languages. This need not, of course, indicate that the Indo-Europeans invented wheeled vehicles, but it might suggest that they were in some form of contact relation with these Near Eastern languages in the fourth millennium BC. (Mallory, 1989)’

Sumerian gigir, inscribed in the cuneiform tablets of the third millennium BCE, may indeed provide the earliest written testimony for an originally PIE word.”

Parpola, A., The Roots of Hinduism, the Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization, 2015, p.43.


“The earliest discoveries of actual wheels in Mesopotamia come from the first half of the third millennium BC - more than half a millennium later than the finds from the Kuban region [in southern Russia].”

Baumer, C., The History of Central Asia: The Age of the Steppe Warriors, 2012, p.90.