Evans, Arthur J.: The Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustred by the discoveries at Knossos (Band 4,2): Camp-stool Fresco, long-robed priests and beneficent genii [...] (London, 1935)

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. up-?*

Fig. 787.



Model Clay Wagon from Palaikastro, with M.M. I a
Polychrome Decoration.

808 APPEARANCE OF WHEELED VEHICLES IN CRETE

Second Volume of this work, is all the more remarkable since its date-
later than the close of the Third Millennium B.C.1—shows that wheel
vehicles had already existed in Crete before the days when Hammur V
reigned in Babylonia. The appearance here of this earliest of EuroDe

wagons—so like

a modern rail-
way truck in
build —at that
distant epoch
supplies a new
commentary on
the wave of
Oriental influ-
ence that seems
to have reached
these shores as
a not remote
consequence of Sargon's Conquest of the 'Western Land'. It was three
or four centuries at least earlier than its first recorded appearance in the
Nile Valley,2 which was also doubtless due to Oriental influence.

A simple kind of truck, with four solid wheels supporting a flat
platform, is the earliest known Egyptian form. By Amenhotep I's time,
however, about the middle of the sixteenth century h.c, a two-wheeled war-
chariot is depicted of the typical Pharaonic kind and supplying the first
known example, either in Egypt or elsewhere, of the four-spoked wheel.

On the early polychrome car—itself of the domestic class—from
Palaikastro there is no trace of a pole, but the wheels, as shown by its re-
production here in Fig. 7S7—though the effect of the painted design must
not be too literally interpreted—seem to illustrate a transitional form which
has the appearance of three concentric circles, one to hold the axle end (the

' Prof. Dawkins observes (of. at., p. 17) small solid disks, and a track is prepared by

that the wagon ' is certainly not later than means of cross-pieces of wood, laid at short

M. M. I a and may, very likely, be as early as intervals on the, presumably, sandy ground.

E. M. Ill'. Another painting, in a tomb of the same

' The earliest Egyptian example is supplied cemetery of Amenhotep I's time, round about

by the wheeled platform supporting a sacred 1550 b.c (J. J. Tylor, Tomi of Kenm, PI ")

boat painted on a wall of a tomb at El shows a two-wheeled chariot, the predecessoi

Kab belonging to the very beginning of the ordinary Egyptian class. The wheels, so

the New Kingdom (J. J. Tylor, Qu, 1900). far as can be gathered from their P»ml

It is four wheeled, the wheels consisting of designs, had four spokes.

of
so
ted