Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.103

c14.103

The sum of our enquiries, therefore, is as follows. It has proved possible, by a correlation of the Vedic texts with the evidence of archaeology, to show that the war-chariot of the Aryans in India was essentially the same vehicle as that known from other areas of Indo-European colonization, whether in Mycenaean and Homeric Greece or in Celtic Britain. The chariots from Iron Age Europe and Britain have a slight but significant modification in the open body, which was otherwise built on a U-shaped plan, but in all other features the resemblance is extremely close and often (as in the single-piece felloe, the yoke and its fastening, and perhaps the wheel-base) identical in the two peripheral areas of Britain and India. Coach-builders’ and wheelwrights’ practice over the whole intervening area seems to have been substantially the same over a period of something like a thousand years.