Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.87

c14.87

To the wooden floor of the chariot was attached the axle, apparently by leather straps: it would project free of the chariot body on each side and carried the wheels, secured by lynch-pins on their outer faces - their stability against the fast-spinning wheel is made use of in effective metaphor. On analogy, again, one would expect this axle to be fixed centrally to the chariot floor, as in those of Mycenaean and in the earlier (fourteenth century) reliefs from Malatya in Asia Minor (and, incidentally, in Iron Age Europe); later Assyrian coach-builders' practice moved the axle to the back of the body. The use of lynch-pins is common to the Celtic and the Egyptian chariots and is likely to have been universal, providing as it does a flexible mode of attachment giving stability over rough country, which ensured its retention in English farm carts up to the present time.