Quickie History: The First Known Use of Wheeled Transport in History

Jamie Chaos

March 9, 2021

I only discovered this today and thought it was worth passing along on the Gram, so don’t expect a thesis paper on the subject. This also has no relation whatsoever to lifting- I just love history.

It appears at this point that the rad-as-fuck-yet-mostly-unknown Indus Valley Culture (350001900BCE) that stretched from the Arabian Sea through southern Pakistan, northern India, and northeast Afghanistan is the culture that invented wheeled transport (along with yoga, Ayurvedic medicine, and a unique family of martial arts that influenced all of Asia).

Like the many of other cultures who were totally or mostly wiped out by the Yamnaya/Indo Europeans after the domestication of the horse (the Minoans, Etruscans, and IVC in particular), the IVC people revered the cow (and jumping over cows, in a hilariously old timey preface of that dude on Youtube jumping an NSX), so rather than using horses they used oxen to pull carts (and the horse hadn’t yet been domesticated when they started using carts). Those carts facilitated trade with the horse-riding cultures of the Near East and southern Russia, and those cultures then adopted that tech for chariots, which they then used to dominate everyone from Egypt to India and China (along with smallpox).

Chariots were first found in the Ukraine in their culture, the Sintasha, was spread throughout all of the rad scalping-motherfuckers-on-horseback lands. The Sintasha were pushed out of their homelands by the same climate change that had forced the IVC civilization out of their cities and into smaller settlements due to water shortages.

The IVC people lived in planned cities laid out in a grid pattern that featured public and private baths and even had some homes with flush toilets, a mere 4000 or so years before the rest of the world. Many of the buildings in the IVC were multiple stories high, and were constructed with a serious eye to quality because the Harrapans had the most sophisticated system of weights and measures in the world, along with the smallest recorded unit of measurement (about 1.8mm) in the Bronze Age. In other words, these motherfuckers were a big deal.

If you’re curious, modern South Asians are a mishmash of genetic lines, but where people of European decent have stone-age hunter-gatherers beneath Neolithic famers beneath Indo-European genes, people of South Asia are a combination of IVC/Harrapan and Indo-Europeans.

“Genetic relationships to Steppe pastoralists, who ranged across the vast Eurasian grasslands from contemporary Eastern Europe to Mongolia, are ubiquitous among living South Asians as well as Europeans and other people across the continent. But Steppe pastoralist DNA is absent in the ancient Indus Valley individual, suggesting similarities between these nomadic herders and modern populations arose from migrations after the IVC’s decline. These findings influence theories about how and when Indo-European languages spread widely across the ancient world. And while shared ancestry between modern South Asians and early Iranian farmers has fueled ideas that agriculture arrived in the Indo-Pakistani region via migration from the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, the ancient Harappan genes show little contribution from that lineage, suggesting that farming spread through an exchange of ideas rather than a mass migration, or perhaps even arose independently in South Asia” (Smithsonian).

Their civilization eventually collapsed due to water shortages arising out of climate change and invasion by the Indo-Europeans, who immediately implemented a caste system to box out the inventors of wheeled transport and the flush toilet. That was super rad of them, obviously, because it only set humanity back a few millennia from a sanitation, city planning, and measurement standpoint.

#themoreyouknow

Sources:

Wiki– IVC

Wiki– Sintashta

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!

Jamie Chaos

I am a former all-time, all federation world record holder in raw powerlifting at 181lbs, a record I broke just to say fuck you to the internet’s “lifting” community and the powerlifting community at large. Over the last ten years I’ve written over 500 articles on strength training, nutrition, and supplementation, and continue to do so simply to fight the tide of weakness and sadness that currently pervades the scene I’ve called home for the better part of three decades. I’ve got personal trainin certs, BodyPump and BodyCombat certs, a BA in History and East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona, and MBAs from the Vienna University and University of South Carolina on my side, in addition to some sick lifts and a hell of a lot of rage. What the fuck have you got?

7 responses to “Quickie History: The First Known Use of Wheeled Transport in History”

Jon

March 9, 2021

Very interesting article.
What do you think about the subsequent “invasions” from the North?
Achaeans, dorians, etc…those shaped what would become classic Greece which later influenced the roman empire(via interpretatio romana among other things)…Athens, Sparta (most eugenics-based culture that I know of), etc…
It is a very important topic that is sadly (almost) forgotten.

On the other hand, a few days ago I (re)watched 300…some of it is good, other not so much: Xerxes is a strange vampire-like trans-giant depraved, spartan society is not well represented, the ephors should be different (much less “dionysian”), the oracle in real life was Delphi (and thus Apollo), the ancient gods were not ancient at all but alive and well (unlike today), in real life the oracle/Apollo told Leonidas that either an spartan king or Greece would fall (he went to war and to his almost sure death with dignity)…

Needless to say, I would appreciate more of these historical articles, particularly regarding the ancient world…whenever the muses inspire you, it will be welcome.
1. Jamie Chaos
  
  March 10, 2021
  
  Knowing that the Thracians and Dacians were part of the Etruscan culture and genetic line helped me understand why they were so different, and why the Greeks considered them to basically be barbarians (though that’s comical given the fact that they helped invent civilization in that region. As to the Dorians et al, I think they were the cultural engine of the Greeks, like Hollywood is for the US now. The Spartans, on the other hand, were a hyperviolent backwater of butt-fucking, slave-owning communists, making them about the weirdest bunch of role models a Republican ever had, haha. Eugenicists need to learn their history. And genetics. And linguistics. haha.
  
  Man, the Spartans had money and jewelry in that film- it was as anti-historical as it could be. I’d really wanted them to make Gates of Fire into a film, and as it happens they decided to do one or the other and chose 300. Gates of Fire would make for a far better film, and if you haven’t read it GET IT LITERALLY RIGHT NOW. Like leave work and go to the bookstore.
  
  I am psyched you’re enjoying them, man! I watch so many documentaries it is bonkers, but I feel like the world is thousands of times bigger than it was 10 years ago. When I was a kid the best I could do was reread our encyclopedias and encyclopedic dictionary, but now you can learn almost everything about almost everything, haha.
  
  And I haven’t forgotten about your isometrics stuff- it just bores me to fucking death and the last article has been in development hell as a result. It is 75% finished though, and will surface before my Sharkula film is viewable. And yeah, I am going to be a vampire shark in a horror movie that films next month, haha. I’m going to try on the prosthetic soon, so I’ll put up pics and gifs and all that, along with a basic script description. And before you tell me the film makes no sense, I smash someone’s head with my hands the second I show up onscreen- I don’t give a fuck how little sense it makes, because I am going to have the raddest first kill any actor has ever had. 😀
  1. Jon
    
    March 12, 2021
    
    I didn’t know the book, have ordered it at a local bookstore. I don’t usually read historical novels because they usually are too “hollywoodized” for my tastes, I will tell you when I finish it.
    
    That Sharkula thing looks promising, hahaha. Jamie, those shoulders deserve the foreground, be kind and tell the director.
    Tell us more, you get converted to a “sharkire” or something?
    Lots of violence, I presume, what about sex and girls?
    
    The spartans were clearly a weird group: krypteia, diarchy, ephoroi, gerusia, ecclesia…(Plato , Laws, IV, p172: “In truth, Stranger, when I reflect on the Lacedaemonian polity…”).
    
    Regarding eugenics, genetics, race, history and the likes, my references are James Watson, Cyril Darlington, Plutarch, Xenophon, etc…
    Gods are the portrayal of a particular group at a specific time, bearing its attributes at a maximum: Krishna, Apollo, Hermes, Yahveh, etc… Their “enemies” represent opposing groups: just look at Apollo and Hermes, the latter stealing/misguiding Apollo’s flock…
    Art in its different aspects tell us about their deeds, it is propaganda/religion (all of them synonyms) in a more or less subconscious way: art imitates life and life imitates art, the promotion of one group (or god) always comes to the detriment of others, and a particular group always tries to perpetuate itself. The demotion of opposing groups via their gods or the attribution of a particular god to a group is old as mankind.
    Via interpretatio romana the romans assimilated the greek pantheon, in a similar way it has happened through history many times.
    If there is no god, there is no people, no “civilization/tribe/empire”, nothing. No culture, no roots, no strength. That is why if a god gets demoted, beheaded or “altered”, the people go astray: they are no longer what they were.
    Miths/art are as important as history itself.
    That said, I agree with the dorians being a sort of cultural engine in that time.
    
    The isometrics thing: I have altered my training quite a bit because I discarded what was not working, now I do lots of bodyweight combined with isos: : (handstand, crucifix and extended plank) pushups, one leg squats, ab wheel leg curls/inverted planks on tiptoes, sissy squats, pure isometrics with strap/handles/grenadier grips (neck, deadlifts, shrugs), etc…
    Also, lots of isos ala Maxalding and Bronson.
    I have a year of experience with the spring isos/partials and want a whole another year for the bodyweight + isos thing and I will see what is the best of each. What I can tell you now is that this requires even less setup and equiment and works even better in some ways: easier on the joints, I can easily do both full/partial range and isos with or without a strap in the same set, I just need a strap and a wall, feels primal.
    If you want more info for an article, send me an email and I will gladly contribute.
rich

March 10, 2021

Tangentially I love the shared history between all branches of IE peoples. Just looking at the linguistics gives me a nerd boner. No homo (man), humus (soil)->duine (man in old irish)->dhg’hom (soil in PIE). I’ll be here all week.
1. Jamie Chaos
  
  March 10, 2021
  
  It has been really cool to discover the culture has fairly little to do with ethnicity- if there’s been one great find in archaeology in the last 20 years, I think that’s it. History has become so much more nuanced in the last couple of decades, and the combo of linguistics and genetics has really unlocked a lot of that goodness.
  1. Ant Pace
    
    March 19, 2021
    
    Surely the determining factor is the economic infrastructure, the level of development of the productive forces, rather than any secondary superstructural creation such as concepts of God/s. At a certain level of development of the productive forces, one finds a certain group of cultural traits, broadly speaking. Take family structure as an illustration. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/origin_family.pdf
    1. Jamie Chaos
      
      March 20, 2021
      
      If you opened your mouth at me with that coffeeshop communism in person, it would be that last act you committed while breathing. Once again, jog on son.