SUMERIAN TECHNOLOGY—BOBULA 659 
VEHICLES 
The excavators of Ur were awed to find among the earliest 
Mesopotamian sculptures a limestone relief depicting a wheeled 
chariot. “The plain wheels are made of two semicircular pieces, 
joined by copper clamps round a central core. The wheel, a great 
human discovery, was in use at Ur more than fifteen hundred years 
before it was imported into Egypt,” said one of the early reports 
published by the University of Pennsylvania. 
Ficure 32.—Electrum mascot from the queen’s sledge. 
Soon the real wheels of the archaic period came to light, in the Royal 
Tombs of Ur, in Kish, and Susa. They were the wheels of four- 
wheeled chariots. The earliest indication of the use of wheeled 
vehicles is a pictograph sign in one of the oldest written documents 
of humanity—a clay tablet from the temple of the goddess Inanna 
in Uruk dated to ca. 3500 B.C. The wheels of clay model chariots 
were first found in the Uruk stratum, though the earliest known 
picture of a wheeled vehicle is on a seal impression of the Jamdet 
Nasr age. Sir Leonard Woolley (1955) credits the epoch-making 
invention to the people of the Sumerian temple city Uruk (Warka). 
In the years following the excavations, feeble but repeated efforts 
were made to blur the picture and raise doubts about this outstanding 
achievement of the Sumerians. In opposition to such efforts, a body of 
experts working on the five-volume pioneer study of Oxford Uni- 
versity’s History of Technology reached the conclusion that the 
wheel was most likely invented about 3500 B.C. in Lower Mesopo- 
tamia, and that it was an original invention. 
There is every reason to suppose that the boat was an even older 
vehicle than the chariot. The clay model found in a man’s grave 
