The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions by Richard W. Bulliet (review)

Bulliet’s interest in Middle Eastern modes of transport in history has resulted in a number of well-received studies, most notably his monograph, The Camel and the Wheel (New York, 1975). Forty years later he returns to the wheel, now with the aim of piecing together the nature of its first invention and introduction, as well as following its history over subsequent centuries. Bulliet is therefore on largely familiar ground, and he uses to good effect his experience in applying archaeological evidence—even of the most incomplete sort—to working out seemingly impossible puzzles.

Bulliet’s technical, as well as archaeological and historical, erudition are on display throughout The Wheel. At the outset, he alerts readers to certain technical distinctions that any student of the wheel must observe. Most important is the differentiation between independently rotating wheels (wheels that revolve around a stationary axle), wheel sets (wheels that are attached to rotating axles in pairs), and casters (wheels that rotate independently on an axle, which in turn are free to pivot, typically at right angles to the axle). This differentiation is important to Bulliet because his history depends on distinguishing the stories of the three types from each other, allowing him to be much clearer about how the specific functions of wheels in particular applications must be understood to make sense of the evidence.

Bulliet traces the most important area for the wheel’s early development to the areas north and slightly west of the Black Sea. He uses both archaeological and linguistic evidence to suggest that particular circumstances promoted the development of the first carts, especially for moving heavy loads within and from mines. Homes on wheels, war chariots, and other variations followed, and Bulliet examines the circumstances promoting (and often later demoting) each one of them. The symbolic significance of wheels, and their appearance in devotional and funerary items, as well as their depiction in early illustrated or carved representations, allows Bulliet the opportunity to examine (or, at least, infer) the changing status of wheels in addition to their functions.

Using a similarly wide range of evidence, Bulliet takes his story all the way into the twenty-first century. Along the way, the rise and fall of war chariots, the feminization of wheeled transport, and the ascendency of carriages occupy entire chapters. Bulliet is careful to avoid making his discourse too culture-specific; he at least raises the questions that others have asked about the general lack, or diminished significance, of wheeled transport in many parts of the world—from the Americas to sub-Saharan Africa to the Far East. Bulliet effectively punctures the often-facile answer, that many of these cultures had little or no access to draft animals, with an extensive discussion of the persistence, in both wheeled and unwheeled cultures, of human-powered transport. Bulliet, however, tends to turn the question around, asking what special circumstances would make the advantages of wheels most compelling. In some cases, as in the early mining examples, this tactic works, whereas in others—for example, why chariots were popular in some areas and not in others—this approach is less convincing.

Bulliet’s work is a fine contribution to the history of transport. Nonetheless, readers may be disappointed that a book entitled The Wheel pays almost no attention to wheels not connected specifically to transport. Bulliet makes a quick reference to potters’ wheels and a couple more to wheeled toys but mainly to dismiss them as irrelevant to his core concern. He has a point, but he might have given a little more attention to the psychological significance, on numerous levels, of wheels in human culture. The wheels of geared machines, of lathes and pulleys, and of mills—hand, animal, water, and wind—all shape human ideas about motion and the possibilities of motion, and they too had different fates in different cultures, shedding yet more light on both the differences and similarities in human encounters with roundness.