--- Alexander Stolbov <
astolbov@...> wrote:
> The fact that horse remains were found in Denmark
> doesn't say anything
> definite yet. Anyway South Scandinavia has been
> settled by IE population and
> horse had to be of a special importance in that
> society - remember typical
> IE Bronze Age petroglyphs from this region depicting
> chariots (BTW I can not
> explain to myself how chariots with spoked wheels
> which seem to be invented
> in steppes near Ural relatively late - about 2000 BC
> - succeeded to reach so
> quickly such a distant place as Sweden? And what to
> do with chariots in
> northern forests?)
*****GK: I remember seeing a reproduction of that
Swedish petroglyph. The wheel type didn't stick in my
mind. If it was indeed a "spoked wheel" chariot then
its presence there is certainly curious (unless it was
a story told by a traveller about "the gods of the
South" which was then used by a local artist(:=))==
There were older war chariots of course, with more
primitive solid wheels. These were also found in
Sintashta (Urals) where the spoked wheel innovation
likely occurred. AFAIK the earliest war chariot of any
type discovered so far (a solid wheeler)was part of a
Catacomb culture burial at Mariivka just west of the
Dnipro: cf. N.N. Cherednichenko, S.Zh. Pustovalov,
"Boevie kolesnitsi v obshchestve katakombnoj kulturi
(po materialam razkopok v Nizhnim Podneprovie)" in
Sovetskaia Arkheologiia (1991), n.4, pp. 206-216.
["War chariots in the Catacomb culture society"]. The
Catacomb culture (successor to the Yamna) has now been
redated to ca. 2900-1800 BC (extreme early/late
calibrated RC dates) or 2600-2200 BC (median RC
calibrations): see the article in ANTIQUITY 74 (2000)
pp.793-799 on the Kalmykia finds).*****
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