4,000-year-old wooden wagon - photo

[Jon]

I found another picture that shows fragments of the yoke

Source: Discovering Armenia - Armenia

and a couple of other wagons too.

Source: https://allinnet.info/news/artik-arm...of-bronze-age/

Good find. So the wagon was preserved under the lake, and was probably originally interred due to a burial ritual - including the horses from the funeral procession, still alive?

They were not chariots but four-wheel carts probably catafalques – that is a cart on which a body is placed for its funeral procession to the grave. The cart and horses are then buried with the hero.

One of the ironies of ancient cultures and their complex religiously-themed burial rituals was that, in a sense, they worked well. However, the "afterlife" turned out to be the modern era, millennia later, where they are studied by historians and archaeologists.

Stuart Piggott's book The Earliest Wheeled Transport looks interesting. The dating of the wagon seems curious to me, but I'm not familiar with that era of history.