Technology and Culture

This clearly written, beautifully illustrated, and well-argued book ought to be read by every historian of technology. Richard Bulliet here broadens and greatly amplifies his The Camel and the Wheel (1975). The Wheel is an ambitious survey of three different kinds of wheel, covering 6,000 years. Wheels fixed on axles that spin together (on railroad cars, for example) cannot make sharp turns, while those that spin independently of one another (as with automobiles) can turn more sharply. The third kind of wheel, the caster, emerged in the eighteenth century; it “rotates on an axle and also pivots in a socket situated above it,” for example in desk chairs (p. 2).

To illustrate the properties of these three kinds of wheel, Bulliet begins with how they were adapted to different forms of transportation in recent centuries (pp. 1–36). He then examines the wheel’s origins in the fourth millennium bce, suggesting what prompted its invention and adoption in some but not all cultures. Dismissing the orthodox view that the wheel was invented in Mesopotamia, he argues for its origin in the copper mines of the Carpathian Mountains, where carts proved useful (pp. 51–70). Wheels then spread to the Black Sea and its adjoining steppes, where the second form of wheel was invented, which improved maneuverability (pp. 71–92). Living in four-wheeled wagons (pulled by oxen) and portable tents became basic to nomadic life and remained common on the steppes until the late eighteenth century.

Bulliet finds that the wheel was not adopted by ancient Egyptians, who built the pyramids without it. Likewise, wheeled vehicles were rare in Mesopotamia. “The first wheels in Europe precede the earliest Sumerian pictograms.” Compared to the Black Sea region, Mesopotamian cultures did not make wheels in the same way, and they did “not use their wheeled vehicles for the same purposes” (pp. 93–112). Suitable wood for wheels was rarely available along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, though vehicles for [End Page 869] religious and royal processions were built, as well as clumsy battle wagons pulled by half-wild onagers. Bulliet discusses the possibility that the wheel “spread as an idea but not as a technology” (p. 106). But he also considers in detail the possibility of its independent invention and the relationship between this question and the timing of the domestication of oxen, onagers, camels, donkeys, and horses.

By ca. 2000 bce the three vehicle traditions interacted, and “the two-wheeled oxcart with independently rotating wheels became the standard vehicle everywhere” (p. 115). Spoked wheels replaced solid ones. The precursor of the chariot apparently emerged on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and spread westward. As faster animals were harnessed, the speeding chariot became a new form of ostentation and part of the Hittite arsenal. The bow and arrow was the charioteer’s preferred weapon, as attested in Sanskrit epics. Yet already by Homer’s day military tactics made the chariot obsolete in battle, though it had become the mythic vehicle of gods and rulers (pp. 123–24). However, by the seventh century wheeled vehicles were losing their status, both in China and Europe. They recovered high status in Europe during “the carriage revolution” between 1400 and 1650 (pp. 147–64), an innovation that the Chinese did not adopt, although they did develop the portable palace (pp. 165–84).

Given Bulliet’s long chronology, he cannot deal with mill wheels, gears, or wheels in scientific instruments and tools. He focuses on the wheel in transportation, from mining carts to nomadic wagons to Sumerian ceremonial vehicles to chariots, carriages, and rickshaws (pp. 185–204) and, more briefly, in modern times. This masterful work demonstrates how crucial culture is in the adoption of a technology, which “is affected by . . . economic efficiency, military utility, social class, gender, aesthetics, and religion” and also by geographical factors such as the wood available or the roughness of the terrain. The “story of the wheel helps us understand that invention is seldom a simple matter...