The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The revolutionary double act that set the world in a spin
The wheel – the most revolutionary of all inventions? Jokes aside, let’s not forget the axle either. Without that, for most applications, a wheel – or a pair of wheels – is virtually useless. I am told that, technically, the two together form a sort of continuous lever, with the axle bearing the load and the effort distributed around the perimeter of the wheel. But whatever the physics, without this simple lever, civilisation and technology could not have developed as they have. And travel – overland at least – would still be a long, slow and tortuous slog.
We will never know exactly when this beautifully simple and incredibly efficient machine was invented. The earliest wheels used for turning clay
To read about other objects in our series so far, see telegraph.co.uk/ tt-80objects. pots survive from about 7,000 years ago, but for the first evidence of wheeled vehicles we have to rely on pictures of wagons scratched into tablets found in Mesopotamia that date to about 3,500-3,350 BC. However, wheeled transport was probably developed before this, perhaps independently in China, the Middle East and Europe.
Remarkably, the earliest known wheel from a functioning vehicle – probably some kind of two-wheeled hand cart – is nearly as old as those Mesopotamian pictograms and is European in origin. Found only 19 years ago in Slovenia, and now in pride of place in a display case in the City Museum in Ljubljana, it is in surprisingly good shape – only about two thirds intact, but still clearly recognisable as a large circular wheel. And near it was found the all-important oak axle, about 4ft long and in almost perfect condition.
The wheel is made out of two boards of ash, neatly jointed together with four wooden braces fitted into slots cut across the panels. Together they form a circle 28ins in diameter and 2ins thick with a square hole cut in the middle.
This, if you think about it for a moment, means the whole axle must have rotated with the wheel, which was secured in place with oak wedges. It is not known exactly how the axle was attached to the chassis – perhaps through boards with holes drilled through them. Radiocarbon dating suggests the boards are between 5,100 and 5,350 years old – the early centuries of the Bronze Age, which began about 3,500 BC – making it at least a century older than similar wooden wheels found in Switzerland and Germany.
The find was made by archaeologists excavating a site in the Ljubljana marshes about a dozen miles southeast of the Slovenian capital. It is a rather beautiful area of fields and meadows, hedges and water channels, worth visiting in its own right, and it is rich in ancient history.
The inhabitants who made the wheel probably lived in “pile houses”: wooden cabins built on stilts to raise them above the marshy ground and
protect them from flooding. The area was listed as a world heritage site by Unesco in 2011 because of the wealth of prehistoric finds that emerged – especially that wooden wheel.