4,000-year-old wooden wagon - photo

[Jon]

4,000-year-old wooden wagon. Found near Lake Sevan in Armenia.

Fullsize image: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/h...n_fullsize.jpg

[NortonDommi]

That is absolutely amazing! In only 63 years since the creation of the world Man was already building awesome stuff!
The way the hoops are made they would be strong for their weight much like modern roof trusses and floor beams and quicker to make than steam bending for a one-off.
There is a lot going on with this construction. I'm thinking that trunnels were used in he making n which case it is no wonder it is still intact.

[Moby Duck]

Even more amazing is that they were able to make wagons that worked without axles.

[Isambard]

I think you may have the odd historical exactitude in your post, but here is earlier version of the wheel which is quite interesting...
https://slovenia.si/art-and-cultural...d-in-slovenia/

[owen moore]

Looks like a Fred Flintstone design!

[Isambard]

LOL! Think again! Fred only had rollers, his descendants would invent the wheel a lot later, after the dinosaurs...

[Elizabeth Greene]

It looks like the wheel hubs are part of the center plank of the wheel, or maybe that is the axle and it's just hidden by the age of the piece. I wonder how they glued the planks together to make the wheel too? The bows on the wagon are a complex compound structure of an inner bow, an outer bow, and spacers in between. That would be very lightweight, super rigid, and easy to tie things to.

That a wooden structure survived 4,000 years is unimaginable to me. Was it in a tomb or something? I'd like to know more. Could you share which museum has this?

[Elizabeth Greene]

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/

[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.