Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.85

c14.85

It looks, therefore, as if the battle-car was an invention of Early Dynastic Sumer and that its use was adopted, with other technological devices, such as metallurgy and the shaft-hole axe (and probably the heptatonic scale in instrumental music), by the Indo-Europeans on the northerly fringes of the kingdom of Sumer and Akkad soon after 2000 B.C., given added speed and lightness by the use of horses and the invention of the spoked wheel, and spread by them in their expansion to east and west. It remained, of course, an essential weapon of the armies of Babylonia and Assyria until well into the first millennium B.C., as a vehicle to carry a bowman.