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The wheel

The wheel is one of the Great Inventions of Mankind, and there’s no need to labour the benefits that it will have brought to ordinary folk. But there was no inevitability about it. The South Americans civilisations didn’t invent the wheel, or the arch for that matter, as we discuss later.

But it also illustrates the theory that we discuss elsewhere, that technical innovation and great civilisations tend not to mix. The weel was not invented by the Ancient Egyptians, or any of the other great civilisations that were around at the time. If it had been we’d have known both the where and the when. In fact we don’t know either.

The road wheel is widely agreed to have been a spin-off from the potter’s wheel. You would think we would know exactly where and when the potter’s wheel was invented, because it will immediately have led to properly round pottery. And pottery preserves beautifully. Maybe the archaeologists know, but I’ve not been able to find it.

We don’t know when the road wheel was invented to within hundreds of years. Perhaps it was between 5½ and 6 thousand years ago. Neither do we really know where it was invented. The favourite candidate is Sumer in Mesopotamia, now part of Iraq. A depiction of onager-drawn carts on the Sumerian "battle standard of Ur" (circa 2600 BC) But ‘darkest’ Europe is also in the running. The arguments for Europe are first, that our hard ground will have made it difficult to drag heavy loads. Second, that wheels are actually quite difficult things to make – even the simple board-like wheels depicted in the picture. And our plentiful supply of timber will have bred a good supply of skilled craftsmen able to meet the challenge. I’m not taking sides in this. I’m content to make the point that the origin of the wheel is still that uncertain. The picture comes from Wikipedia, but it is from around a thousand years later in Sumeria.

As we’ve seen, the invention of the wheel wasn’t inevitable. No South American civilisation did it. It’s often argued that the Incas didn’t invent the wheel because their country was too mountainous for it to be much use. But in fact they’d have benefited as much as we did from wheels. And we now know that there were other civilisations that lived in much more wheel-friendly territory. The South Americans didn’t invent the arch either. So they would not have been able to build bridges for wheeled traffic over their rivers.

Perhaps we should consider for a moment, what our life might be like today without wheels.