SIR C. LEONARD WOOLLEY'S 1922 excavation of the Royal Cemetery of Ur—a Sumerian site located in modern-day Iraq—was, by early 20th-century standards, a major media event. Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia, who had achieved fame for his dashing exploits during the Arab Revolt several years earlier, helped to organize the expedition. British mystery writer Agatha Christie paid a visit to the site and penned Murder in Mesopotamia as a tribute (she would later marry Woolley's assistant). All this fuss over a box with a picture of a wheel on it.
It wasn't just any box, of course. It was the Standard of Ur, a 4,600-year-old container, the size of a shoebox (above), encrusted in lapis lazuli. Most important, it featured an illustration of ancient warfare that included the oldest uncontested image of the wheel in transportation. A series of images depicted tanklike carriages, each with four solid wheels braced to their axles and a team of horses propelling them forward. The wheeled carriages clearly provided soldiers with better protection against ambush than the poor foot soldiers had, who are shown squirming to avoid horses’ hooves.
This ancient Humvee wasn't the only way fifth-millennium engineers deployed wheels. The Sumerians, Egyptians and Chinese all used wheels for spinning pots, and Egyptians moved massive stones with log rollers. Wheels never caught on for ordinary transport because they weren't useful on the sandy soils of the world's trade routes, says Richard Olson, a historian and author. Camels remained the all-terrain vehicle of choice for another 2,000 years or so.
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Wheeled vehicles didn't take off until the advent of roads. The Egyptians built extensive dirt roads and paved some of them with sandstone, limestone and even a surfacing of petrified wood. By as far back as 3,500 years ago, they fashioned a metal wheel with six spokes, and from the Middle East to Russia, agile, two-wheeled chariots became all the rage.