The wheel: an invention that has never been replaced

From a donkey cart to an aeroplane, from a bicycle to the parts that turn the hands of a clock, the wheel is everywhere. It seems so ordinary that we hardly think there was ever a world without it. The fact is that humans took up farming, made clay pots and built permanent houses thousands of years before the wheel. The wheel came relatively late, but when it came, everything changed.

What exactly is a wheel?

A wheel is not just a round piece of material. Its real worth shows when it is joined to an axle, a rod passing through its centre. Then a heavy load can be rolled instead of dragged, and more work is done with less effort. So when experts speak of the history of the wheel, they are really speaking of the wheel and axle together.

According to the World History Encyclopedia, the wheel is believed to have been invented around 3500 BCE, first as the potter’s wheel, and later put to use in transport. The potter’s wheel made pots quicker and cheaper to produce.

Mesopotamia and Europe: two claimants

The credit for inventing the wheel is often given to the Sumerians of Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. According to the World History Encyclopedia, by 3000 BCE the Sumerians were using two- and four-wheeled carts to carry people and goods. Citing the historian Stephen Bertman, the same source says the wheels of these carts were made of two solid half-discs of wood fixed together with nails, and were fitted with leather tyres.

Interestingly, however, the oldest actual wheel found so far comes not from Mesopotamia but from central Europe. This is why experts say the idea of the wheel may have arisen first in Mesopotamia, but the oldest remains survived in Europe.

The wheel from the Ljubljana marshes

In 2002, archaeologists working in a marshy area near Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, found a wooden panel that looked ordinary at first glance. On closer examination it turned out to be a wheel, and its axle was found with it. According to the official Slovenian website, radiocarbon dating put its age at between about 5,100 and 5,350 years. That made it at least a century older than the wheels from Switzerland and southern Germany, which had earlier been considered the oldest.

The wheel is made of two ash panels cut from the same tree, and its axle is of oak. It was found in the remains of a settlement of pile dwellings built on the marsh and was probably part of a two-wheeled hand cart. Today it is kept in the City Museum of Ljubljana, which describes it as the oldest known wooden wheel with an axle.

A vehicle in a picture

Besides actual wheels, pictures also bear witness. A clay pot found at Bronocice in southern Poland carries a design that looks like a four-wheeled vehicle. According to a 2019 article in the Polish journal Archaeologia Polona, the pit from which the pot came dates to about 3400 BCE. This is indirect evidence that vehicles were in use in central Europe at that time. The same article quotes the expert David Anthony as saying it is the oldest well-dated image of a wheeled vehicle in the world, though the article also mentions other interpretations of the design.

From solid wheels to spokes

The earliest wheels were solid and heavy. According to the World History Encyclopedia, the wheel reached the steppes of Eurasia around 3100 BCE. Around 2000 BCE a light, horse-drawn chariot was invented east of the southern Ural Mountains, where the oldest chariots have been found. Light spoked wheels made it possible to build lighter and faster vehicles.

The wheel-shaped amulet of Mehrgarh

A tiny copper amulet found at Mehrgarh in Balochistan has the shape of a spoked wheel: a ring with six spokes. According to a study published in Nature Communications in 2016, it is about 6,000 years old and comes from layers dated 4500 to 3600 BCE. It is not the wheel of a vehicle but an ornament or symbol, and it was made by the lost-wax casting method. Even so, it shows that the shape of a round ring with spokes radiating from the centre existed in the minds of craftsmen in this region very long ago.

The wheel in life today

The City Museum of Ljubljana says in its exhibition that thousands of years of ingenuity have not produced any replacement for the wheel. The buses on our roads, the tractors in our fields, the machines in factories, the turbines in hydropower stations and the potter’s same old wheel are all forms of this one idea. This simple invention, more than 5,000 years old, still turns with us every moment.