Wheel 2

Europe
In continental Europe, wheeled vehicles first appear around 3000-2500b.c.in the form of heavy wagons drawn by oxen and supported by four massive, single-piece disc wheels. These vehicles could weigh as much as a ton and required enormous planks from 400-500 year old oak trees to fashion the single-piece wheels. Actual wheels from these vehicles have been dug from bogs in Northern Europe and whole wagons have been found in high-status burials from Eastern Europe and Transcaucasia. Judging from representational evidence and from the burials, these vehicles were used for both utilitarian transport and elite ritual. 13
Then, around 2000-1800b.c., Europe also saw the introduction of the horse-drawn chariot. The first traces are from the Timber-Grave/Andronovo sites of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture in modern Kazakhstan 14(see fig. 5). By the end of the second millennium, the chariot had spread to all of continental Europe. Of particular note is the use of the chariot in Mycenaean Greece. Judging from the Linear B tablets and the somewhat anachronistic imagery of theIliadepic, one can surmise that the chariot was mostly used in Bronze Age Greece as an elite conveyance. It was used primarily in ritual, but only sporadically in warfare, in a form of chivalrous combat between champions. 15With the fall of Mycenae and the other great city-states at the hands of the "Sea Peoples" around 1200b.c., Greece seems to have fallen into a dark age and lost knowledge, or need of, the chariot until around 800b.c., when orientalizing influences from the East reintroduced it to pre-Classical Greece. 16By the seventh centuryb.c., cavalry also became an important component of Greek armies, while the chariot began to be used almost exclusively for display and competitive racing, such as at the Olympics. 17