Antiquities Exhibits

I ran across these images of this fascinating chariot while researching the Roman cavalry relief in the Capitoline Museum.  I've photographed the beautiful Monteleone Etruscan chariot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York dated to 530 BCE but have never seen this one before. Over 300 ancient chariots are known to still exist but only six are reasonably complete. Surprisingly, the chariot was actually invented to provide a moving platform from which soldiers could shoot at enemies with arrows or javelins before mounted cavalry was introduced into ancient warfare.  Scholars think the horses were initially weaker and unable to support a man.  They were eventually bred to be stronger until they could be mounted and rode about a millennium and a half after the chariot was invented. The first reference to chariots was found in Syria and dated to about 1800 BCE.  Scholars claim on suitable terrain the chariot was an effective weapon and the number of chariots compar...

I was researching information about some of the objects I photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art and came across a picture of this elegant Proto-Hittite oxen-drawn cart, 2000-1800 BCE.  When I first photographed the piece back in 2006 it was still quite corroded but I see the museum has since conserved it beautifully. Writing in a guide to the museum's collection, Anne Bromberg observes, "This bronze cart drawn by a pair of long-horned oxen is one of many examples of an artistic type well known from the early second millennium B.C.E. Such models were probably votive offerings, to be left in shrines, sacred caches, or tombs. They reflect the distinctive moment when men first used domesticated horses or cattle to draw wheeled vehicles, creating the beginning of powered transport on land. Although drawings of wheeled vehicles occur all over Eurasia, this seminal development in human culture probably originated in Mesopotamia or the Russian Steppes in the late third millennium B...