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A chariot is a type of carriage driven by a charioteer using primarily horses to provide rapid motive power. Chariots were used in militaries as transport or mobile archery platforms, for hunting or for racing, and as a conveniently fast way to travel for many ancient peoples. The word "chariot" comes from the Latin ''carrus'', itself a loanword from Gaulish. A chariot of war or one used in military parades was called a ''car''. In ancient Rome and some other ancient Mediterranean civilizations a ''biga'' required two horses, a ''triga'' three, and a ''quadriga'' four. The horse chariot was a fast, light, open, two-wheeled conveyance drawn by two or more horses that were hitched side by side, and was little more than a floor with a waist-high guard at the front and sides. It was initially used for ancient warfare during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but after its military capabilities had been superseded by cavalry the chariot was used for travel, in processions, for games, and in races. The critical invention that allowed the construction of light, horse-drawn chariots was the spoked wheel. The earliest spoke-wheeled chariots date to ca. 2000 BC. The use of chariots peaked around 1300 BC (see Battle of Kadesh). Chariots had lost their military importance by the 1st century AD, but chariot races continued to be popular in Constantinople until the 6th century ==Eastern Europe== The domestication of the horse was an important step toward civilization. An increasing amount of evidence supports the hypothesis that horses were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes (Dereivka centered in Ukraine) approximately 4000-3500 BC.〔Matossian ''Shaping World History'' p. 43〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=What We Theorize – When and Where Did Domestication Occur )〕 The invention of the wheel most likely took place in Europe. Evidence of wheeled vehicles appears from the mid 4th millennium BC near-simultaneously in the Northern Caucasus (Maykop culture), and in Central Europe. Starokorsunskaya kurgan in the Kuban region of Russia contains a wagon grave of the Maikop Culture. The two solid wooden wheels from this kurgan have been dated to the second half of the fourth millennium. Soon thereafter the number of such burials in this Northern Caucasus region multiplied.〔Christoph Baumer, (''The History of Central Asia: The Age of the Steppe Warriors''. ) I.B.Tauris, 2012 ISBN 1780760604 p90〕〔Chris Fowler, Jan Harding, Daniela Hofmann, eds, (''The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe.'' ) OUP Oxford, 2015 ISBN 0191666882 p113〕 As David Anthony writes in his book The Horse, the Wheel and Language, in Eastern Europe, the earliest well-dated depiction of a wheeled vehicle (a wagon with two axles and four wheels) is on the Bronocice pot (c. 3500 BC). It is a clay pot excavated in a funnelbeaker settlement in southern Poland. The oldest securely dated real wheel-axle combination in Eastern Europe is the Ljubljana Marshes Wheel (c. 3150). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「chariot」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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