V] THE DEVELOPMENT OF EQUITATION 485 



the Thracian ox-cart (p. 106), the oldest representation of any 

 such vehicle that has reached us, his faith in this second hypo- 

 thesis will be shaken on discovering that this ox-cart runs on 

 four-spoked wheels. If it be said that this cart belongs to 

 a comparatively advanced period, and that in earlier days, 

 when agriculture was in its infancy, the carts used had solid 

 wheels, I at once reply that amongst two at least of the great 

 races which at the dawn of history had domestic horses 

 the Libyans and the Turko-Tartaric peoples agriculture was 

 scarcely, if at all, practised, for both were essentially nomadic ; 

 whilst though the Scythians in later times at least used four- 

 wheeled waggons to convey their families, the Libyans never 

 used either ox-cart or ox-waggon for that purpose. It must 

 also be clearly borne in mind that primeval agriculture 

 had no need for the cart. Corn was not bound in sheaves as 

 with us and carried home on carts or waggons. The ears of 

 corn only were snipped off, gathered into baskets and carried 

 to the threshing-floor or garner. Indeed, in the days when 

 North Africa was one of the chief granaries of Rome, a 

 basketful of corn-ears was placed as the symbol of Africa on 

 a coin of Hadrian. Again, as there was no manuring in 

 the common field system, there was no need of a cart for 

 manure. The functions which in our minds are so inseparably 

 associated with carts and waggons were in the earliest stages 

 of society discharged by human beasts of burden, as they still 

 are over a large part of Africa, and later on by pack-animals, as 

 they were in medieval Europe and are in wide regions of the 

 earth down to this very hour. 



These facts sufficiently refute Dr Harm's 1 theory that 

 wheeled vehicles did not arise from the sledge fitted with a 

 roller, for in that case (said he) wheeled vehicles would 

 have arisen wherever rollers have been employed. He main- 

 tains that the waggon arose only in the district from which 

 agriculture originally spread, which he assumes to be Greece. 

 He believes that the waggon was primitively a holy imple- 

 ment, consecrated to Demeter, the great goddess of agriculture 

 and fertility, and that it only subsequently became a secular 

 1 Demeter und Baubo (1896, Liibeck) ; Haddon, op. cit. pp. 170-1. 



