490 THE DEVELOPMENT OF EQUITATION [CH. 



paratively scarce in most parts of the ancient world. The 

 hewing of a section of a tree trunk two feet in diameter to 

 serve as a solid wheel rather indicates a period when tools of a 

 superior kind were available, or otherwise the task would have 

 been so difficult that man would probably have resorted to some 

 other method of shaping discs on which to set the frame of his 

 car, though of course it is not utterly impossible that man by 

 dint of hacking with a bronze, copper, or even a stone axe, 

 could have managed to rough-hew a pair of solid wheels con- 

 nected by an axletree out of a tree-trunk. But as such wheels 

 could never have been of practical use for war-chariots, and the 

 Libyans, who had never any ox-cart, had devised for themselves 

 long before they had metal in any quantity beautifully light 

 chariots, in the structure of which no metal was employed, 

 it is most unlikely that their spoked wheels were evolved from 

 an antecedent block wheel. In the Florentine chariot the 

 wheels are four-spoked and are 38 inches in diameter, both 

 felloe and spokes being made of rods about one and a half 

 inches in diameter. The spokes fit into a hollow hub formed 

 of a wooden cylinder about nine inches long, with fairly thick 

 walls through which the axle runs. The whole structure of 

 this chariot is that of wicker and meshwork (p. 225). It is 

 therefore far more probable that the spoked wheel was an adapta- 

 tion from a circular piece of wicker-work, such as might be used 

 for a shield or for some other purpose. The simplest form of 

 such a circular frame consists of a rim strengthened and kept 

 in shape by two other rods crossing each other at right-angles, 

 thus forming four radii or spokes. The four-spoked wheel is 

 found in the oldest representations of the chariot in Egypt, in 

 Crete, Cyprus, and on the mainland of Greece. That it was 

 considered by the Greeks the most ancient form of wheel is 

 shown by the fact that in the myth of Ixion that miscreant is 

 represented as bound to a four-spoked wheel. As the wheels 

 of the Florentine chariot revolve on the axle, there is no reason 

 to believe that such wheels only came into existence after a 

 long period during which block wheels fixed to the axle had 

 been in continuous use. We may reasonably conclude that the 

 light war-chariot was invented long before the ox-cart or mule- 



