The war chariot was probably invented not in Egypt or Mesopotamia but in the southern Urals.
The oldest spoke-wheeled chariots, from Sintashta graves of about 2100 BC, are as old as the Great Ziggurat of Ur.
The events
- Sintashta culture and the first chariotsc. 2100 BC · Sintashta. On the steppes of the southern Urals, the Sintashta people built fortified settlements and smelted bronze. Their graves hold the earliest known spoke-wheeled chariots, an invention that transformed warfare across Eurasia.
- Great Ziggurat of Urc. 2100 BC · Ur. King Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, built a stepped temple tower to the moon god Nanna. It symbolised the Sumerian revival and is one of the best-preserved monuments of Mesopotamia.
More amazing facts
- 2200 BC Around 2200 BC a single drought may have hit three civilisations at once.
- 2100 BC The first king in the Sumerian King List ruled for 28,800 years.
- 2100 BC · 1754 BC Hammurabi's code was not the first.
- 2100 BC East Asia's oldest observatory is about 4,000 years old. At Taosi in China, slots in an ancient structure seem to have framed the sunrise on the solstices, helping keep a solar calendar.
- 2000 BC The oldest known noodles are about 4,000 years old. The thin yellow strands were found in 2005 in an upturned pot at Lajia on the Yellow River, a village buried by mudflows.
- 2000 BC At Dholavira in India archaeologists found a three-metre 'signboard' of ten Indus signs — and no one can read it. The Indus script is still undeciphered: not a single bilingual inscription has been found.