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Writing and the wheel in Africa
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by the lioness,: [QB] [IMG]http://www.touregypt.net/images/touregypt/chariot10.jpg[/IMG] The Egyptian chariot betrayed its Asiatic origin in a number of ways, by the names of its parts which were Semitic and by its decorations which often took the form of date palm branches or animals opposing each other, both Syrian motifs. However, by the 15th century BC, Pharaoh Tutmoses III had over a thousand chariots at his disposal; by 1400 BC the Great King of the Mitanni had amassed several times that number. We can picture these huge numbers of vehicles charging across the plain straight towards the enemy; the psychological impact of such a charge would have been enormous on untrained and unsteady troops. Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the mid-4th millennium BC, near-simultaneously in Mesopotamia(Sumerian civilization), Indus Valley (Mohenjodaro), the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture) and Central Europe, so that the question of which culture originally invented the wheeled vehicle remains unresolved and under debate. The Ljubljana Marshes Wooden Wheel, the world's oldest known wooden wheel, dating from 5,250 ± 100 BP as part of Globular Amphora Culture, was discovered by Slovenian archeologists in 2002.[3] The earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (here a wagon—four wheels, two axles) is on the Bronocice pot, a c. 3500 – 3350 BC clay pot excavated in a Funnelbeaker culture settlement in southern Poland.[ Nubians from after about 400 BC used wheels for spinning pottery and as water wheels.[9] It is thought that Nubian waterwheels may have been ox-driven[10] It is also known that Nubians used horse-driven chariots imported from Egypt.[1 The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder. "The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College and author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" (Princeton, 2007). "But then making it was also difficult." To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, Anthony explained, the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels' holes, but not too snugly — they had to be free to rotate. Whoever invented it must have had access to wide slabs of wood from thick-trunked trees in order to carve large, round wheels. They also needed metal tools to chisel fine-fitted holes and axles. And they must have had a need for hauling heavy burdens over land. According to Anthony, "It was the carpentry that probably delayed the invention until 3500 B.C. or so, because it was only after about 4000 B.C. that cast copper chisels and gouges became common in the Near East." The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place. However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. The earliest images of wheeled carts have been excavated in Poland and elsewhere in the Eurasian steppes, and this region is overtaking Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) as the wheel's most likely birthplace. According to Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, there are linguistic reasons to believe the wheel originated with the Tripolye people of modern-day Ukraine. That is, the words associated with wheels and wagons derive from the language of that culture. Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (about 1700-1550 BC). The earliest remains of horses are a few bones from Avaris and the skeleton of a horse found at Buhen. The Buhen remains date to the early Second Intermediate Period, but this date is disputed. In the wars between the Theban 17th Dynasty and the Hyksos both sides used horses. In later times, the kingdom of Kush in the Sudan was famous for its horses, perhaps from good grazing grounds in areas of Upper Nubia: in the Victory Stela of king Piy, special mention is made of the royal attention to horses. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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