Why we can’t say who invented the wheel
The wheel was first invented for pottery before humans began using it for transport.
But there are many gaps in our historical knowledge of the evolution of wheel technology.
The wheel sparked an important progression in human history: people were able to travel and move heavy goods over much longer distances, allowing cities to colonise new territories and build empires. This allowed humans to construct permanent structures for advanced cities, like temples and hypocausts.
Our earliest evidence of man-made wheels appeared in Mesopotamia around 7,000 years ago. Archaeologists found a terracotta pottery wheel or ‘tournette’ at Tepe Pardis, a settlement of the Halaf-Ubaid period between 5200 and 4700 BCE, near Tehran in modern-day Iran. This was a tournette or ‘slow wheel’ — a manually rotating disc without an axle. Other settlements in the Tehran plain during this time period also yielded pottery that appeared to have been made using tournettes.
The Sumerians have usually been credited as the first civilization to use wheels for transport. But the evidence for this is uncertain. Excavations of the Sumerian city of Uruk, the world’s largest city in the mid-4th Millennium, unearthed a few clay tablets from around 3500 BCE with rough sketches that some archaeologists believe depict four-wheeled wagons. Our earliest definitive evidence of Sumerian transport wheels is a wooden box from around 2500 BCE decorated with an image of four-wheeled chariots pulled by donkeys.
But a handful of archaeological finds across Eurasia — surviving images, sculptures and toys depicting wheels — indicate several different civilizations, at several different points in history, were using wheels for transport before the Sumerians.
A bronze amulet shaped like a spoked wheel was excavated among the remains of 4,500–3,600 BCE Mehrgarh, a settlement along the Indus River that preceded the Indus Valley Civilization. Some historians have speculated that this may indicate that spoked wheels were used in Mehrgarh as early as the late 5th millennium.
Archaeologists found a toy cow on wheels from the early 4th millennium BCE Tripolye culture in modern-day Romania. These may be creative representations of how these civilisations used wheels in transport, although the evidence for this claim is uncertain.
The tracks of a wheeled cart from around 3,500 BCE were found in the ground under a tomb from the Tricherrandbecher culture in Flintbek, present-day Germany. And pottery from the same culture, which lasted from 4,100 to 2,800 BCE, was also decorated with images of four-wheeled carts.
The oldest surviving transport wheel we’ve found dates back around 3150 BCE and was excavated in the Ljubljana Marshes in contemporary Slovenia. The wheel has a diameter of 56 inches and is made of ash wood. It was part of a two-wheel pushcart with a wheel-and axle mechanism and was found with a 49in oak axle.
Several complete wheels and wagons, marginally younger at around 5,000 years old, have been found in the Pontic steppe of present-day Ukraine. These belonged to the nomadic Yamnaya culture, which lasted from around 3,300 to 2,600 BCE. The Yamnaya culture was closely related to the Tripolye culture which produced the toy cow on wheels around 3,800 BCE.
These instances don’t disprove that the Sumerians were the first to invent wheeled vehicles. But they do suggest that around the time of the earliest known use of wheeled vehicles by the Sumerians, wheels were widely used for transport across many different Eurasian cultures.