Ancient Transportation

An ongoing discussion concerning roman transportation is on the tracks in the narrow streets of Pompeii. What type of vehicle(s) is able to drive around inside the ancient city? When walking around in Pompeii looking at the roads and crossroads (see photo below) the question about wagon-transportation, not least about 4-wheelers, pops into mind, and there-next another much discussed term: the pivoting front-axle!

The discussion of the pivoting front-axle is an old discussion on roman wagon technology, where the “ancient” argument is concentrating on a four-wheeled wagon which failed the ability to take a turn and therefore only moved because of the suppleness in the wooden construction. As a contrast to this view the idea of the pivoting front-axle was introduced with the finds of some roman-age wooden parts, which gave the wagon-construction the ability to turn on a single bolt, which again meant the wagon top was no longer placed directly on the front axle. A possible reconstruction of the pivoting front-axle is seen in the wagon in Cologne, mentioned in previous posts, but it is still to be found in the roman iconographic material.

The question is, though: Is it actually possible to drive a four-wheeled wagon round in a city like Pompeii, pivoting front-axle or not?

This is not an easy question to answer and therefore, instead of trying to do so, I will now turn the attention towards the roman legal question of having vehicles inside the ancient city: what kinds of vehicles were actually allowed in the city and when? Maybe only two-wheeled carts where allowed in the city, and preferably after sunset, as in the case of some medieval cities, and the four-wheeled wagon was more of a country-side vehicle concerned with long-distance cargo.

But where does this bring us in our search for wagon-transport inside ancient Pompeii? The tracks in the paving are clearly visible today, but not all roads bear marks of wagon-usage. Therefore it could be reasonable to assume that the transporting of goods around an ancient city like Pompeii could have been done by small two-wheeled carts concentrating their routes on the bigger more centrally placed in and outgoing roads, and therefor they did not have to make a turn inside the city.

All I know is the fact that I haven’t come across a road-cross inside Pompeii or any other ancient city with a “safe-to-say” mark of wagons taking some kind of turn - almost all marks I have seen are running straight ahead. This uncertainty is due to a photo of mine showing what just might happen to be a “turn-track” (see photo right), but it is unfortunately not safe to conclude anything from this photo alone.

Working with roman wagons, especially as they are seen in carvings, it is necessary to get an idea of how far this material works. Therefore I have chosen two different angles in which to work with roman carvings; one concentrating on ships and how they are seen in the iconographic material, and one concentrating on everyday-life-scenes in provincial roman carvings from the Rhine-Danube borders of the roman empire. The first one is treated here.

Much literature on ancient ships is available in most countries, but what about the iconographic material on ships? I know of only one article dealing with this problem of research (see “Höckmann” in bibliography).

Höckmann is looking at carvings and paintings of ships in an Etruscan and pre-Etruscan context and comparing them to what little is known of real ship-parts most often found around the Tyrrhenian Sea. Where focus in his early chapters are on vase-paintings and small-scale models of Etruscan ships, it moves, for the 4th century BC, to concentrate on carvings and especially on the ones found on the ash-urns from Volterra, Tuscany (see photo right). After a discussion of the iconographic material, where he propose the Etruscans as being the inventors of the ship-Ram (la. Rostra) he ends up concluding that the pictures shown in the early periods are good evidence of Etruscan ship-construction, whereas the carvings on the Volterra Urns, which again often show scenes with mythical themes (see photo below), not are to be taken as evidence for the Etruscan fleet of the 4th or 3rd centuries BC.

This leads to the questions: For what use are articles on the iconography of ships, then? .. and is it actually possible to transfer these working methods into wagon-research?

So far, I am (unfortunately) no longer sure! Höckmann proved in the article that the ancient painter and stone-mason actually was interested in the details of ships in their work, even though they did “misplace” some details in the later carvings. Therefor I do think it is worth working with an idea giving the ancient artist some credit for (and interest in) the details reproduced in the carvings found in Rome as well as in the more provincial areas. 

So far, the series of transportation-carvings has concentrated on wagon and water transport, with a small view to transportation in mountainous areas, but an other field of interest also regarding the Roman period, has so far not been mentioned; the Desert. Large areas of the southern and eastern parts of the Roman Empire was desert-land, which required extraordinary skills to survive and even more to deal with transportation.

The old Egyptians used wagon-transportation, but since the sandy ground is not well fit for heavy wagons, it is difficult to believe that their use of wheeled transportation went beyond the chariots used in war. In stead of wagons, camels were (are) used for transporting goods in this dry climate, and more roman carvings actually show pictures of this peculiar kind of transportation.

One carving in the Capitoline museum (see photo right) show the camel with a saddle and in front of it the owner pulling a rope. This carving has no inscription or modern sign saying what it is or where it come from, but the idea that it might stem from a monument dealing with trade or a tradesman in the desert-region is supported by another carving, this time in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. This carving also show the camel and the owner, but here the camel is showed in the background and focus is on the man.

This latter carving (see photo right) is more easily recognised in type, since it is carved in a style known from the Roman province of Syria, which again, especially, is widespread in the area around Palmyra. Roman Palmyra was for many years one of the most important cities in the Roman east and it got rich due to its location as desert trade-station on the silk-road. Therefor a lot of tradesmen lived here and took care of the difficult and dangerous transport of goods through the desert, and when they died, they where buried in different types of tombs/monuments. The type of carving shown here is often seen as a portrait of the buried person in the tomb of which the carving stem, and carvings of this type are exhibited in more museums around Europe. In this example we have a representation of a man and his work, which can be compared to the carvings from the northern provinces showing the “daily-life”-scenes, and therefor this, along with the carving from the Capitoline Museum, can be categorized as Transportation-Carvings.

Nowadays researchers has successfully tried to find some of the old/Roman Caravan-routes in north Africa, and one of these field-projects is based at the University of Bergen, Norway. For more info please check: www.hist.uib.no/ and click “Antikksider” under the “links”-menu.

Even though some media often concern with italic prehistoric-culture outside Italy, the Italians still have some culture left “at home”.

In the Vatican Museum an Etruscan bronze chariot is exhibited in the “Museo Etrusco Gregoriano”-gallery.

This chariot is made in the same style as the one in the NY Met, mentioned earlier, but the bronze parts is not well preserved in this one (see photo right). Compared to the Met-chariot, the Vatican wagon is much reconstructed, but this only make it more clear how the people in the museum believe this wagon was constructed; wooden parts with bronze-plates as decoration.

This wagon is in a museum, where one could say it might not belong, since the Vatican State has an exclusive status in the Italian Republic, but I have not heard of any Italian authorities demanding this one back to some local museum in the old Etruscan area.. and why not? This wagon is not a part of the Hecht-Medici-case, but it could be argued that the Vatican-chariot belong somewhere else.

This said, the research on Etruscan chariots has a ”missing link”: An over-view! I think it is a “need to be done”-work to gather all information on Etruscan chariots in and outside Italy, and hereby try to establish, if possible, some kind of typology in this material. Almost all wagons exhibited, that I know of, are dated between 550-500 BC, but I do not think it possible to be the only period of Etruscan bronze-chariots. Maybe the purpose of these wagons has nothing to do with war..

The tradition of letting pictures “tell the story” has been practised ever since ancient times. e.g. in churches. An interesting, to the subject here, ”modern” picture is seen on the Vittorio Emanuele Monument in Rome, the big white monument on the northern slope of the Capitoline Hill.

About halfway up, the monument has a platform with a statue and on the statue-base a large carving with “instruments of war” is placed. On one side of the base the carving shows a very detailed four-wheeled wagon for transporting goods. This wagon show details of the traction system and many construction-details, which is very interesting, since here we have an evidence showing how the wagon was constructed in the beginning of the 20th century.

The details are pretty clear on the carving on this monument build in 1911, and since the workmen here were able to make details in their carving, then why not the Romans, too? It is not possible for us to know what the ancient stone masons used as measurement in their carvings, but once in a while we do find details, perhaps not as clear as the ones on the Vittorio Emanuele Monument, but still clear enough to conclude that these carvings where not all made as “free-hand-carvings”.

As in the case with the wagons, carvings on water transport are found in various kinds of roman art and spread all over the roman empire. In the “Land Transportation II”-post I ended up showing a scene from the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, where land and water transportation is joined together, here in a pontoon-bridge. Therefor this post starts with the same type of “joined scene”, also from the Column of M. Aurelius, but this time a boat is transported on a wagon over land (see photo right). The scene is some kind of victory-scene, where trophies are gathered and carried in a boat, and therefor it is not really a scene showing water-transportation.

Scenes of real water-transport are visible in the roman art and carvings, though. In Rome some sarcophagi show scenes of ships, both on full sail and in harbour-areas, and some of these even show some nice details in ship-construction. Here, a good example on that type is a sarcophagus in Copenhagen (see photo right) showing three different ships on the front.

In the provinces ships are also seen in the burial-art, e.g. in the Trier-Moselle-region. The large monument in Igel, show scenes which refer to river-transport (see drawing right), since they clearly show small ships without mast or sail and some men pulling the ships up-stream. The Igel-monument is close to the river Moselle, and the carvings are therefor likely to show scenes from the roman transport on the rivers in Gaul. From another burial-monument by Trier are some sculptures of ships with wine-barrels (see photo left). These are reconstructed as having been some kind of top-figures on the monument, but now the ships are on display individually in the Trier Landesmuseum. These ships are made as sculpture in the round, but I think they are relevant to put in this context as yet another type of Transportation-Carvings.

Since I am working with roman wagons it comes natural to me, to place land-transportation on an equal footing with transport on wagons. There are other means of land-transportation, though, and they are visible in the roman carvings, too.

Especially two kinds of transport pop into mind as alternatives to wagon-transport; walking and transporting on a pack-animal, often a donkey or a mule. On the latter a scene on a burial-monument in Igel by Trier, Germany, illustrates it quite well (see drawing). Here, a man and his animal are seen (twice) crossing a mountain area, which is one of the great advantages in this type of transport, since not all wagons can cross these areas and those who can will need some kind of road.

The other kind of land-transportation is best exemplified in carvings showing transportation of troops. The roman army had a need for transporting large amounts of soldiers very fast between various places in the empire, which again might be one of the main reasons for the road-network. These troops where walking and carrying all their goods, I believe some 25-30 kg each, themselves. Scenes where troops are seen walking together, are especially common on the larger monuments in Rome, where the two columns telling the stories about the Dacian Wars of Emperor Trajan (98-117) and Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180) wars against some Germanic tribes, probably the Marcomanes, carry more scenes of different aspects of war. One scene in particular is interesting here since it combines land- and water-transportation (see photo right). It is from the column of Marcus Aurelius and show the soldiers crossing a bridge made of boats, a pontoon-bridge. It was necessary for the army to cross the Danube, and therefor the roman engineers made a “floating” bridge during the night.

Actually, these more thorough posts were intended earlier than the discussion on the Suspension-system in November, and they were thought as an introduction to the carved material found in the northern roman provinces and in Rome herself.

In Rome some of the most prominent buildings show wagons in more scenes, e.g. The Column of Marcus Aurelius on the Piazza Colonna, and the Arch of Septimius Severus (photo right) in the Forum Romanum, but wagons are also represented on sarcophagi, in both mythical and “every-day-life”-scenes.

These are all nice carvings contributing in different contexts, but my personal field of interest is on the carvings from the northern roman provinces, especially from Pannonia (around modern Hungary) and Gallia Belgica (around Germany and Belgium). Most of these stem from burial monuments of some kind, but we do not know that many details about most of the monuments. In Arlon, Belgium, a lot of carvings were found build into a fortifying wall from the end of the third century AD, without any traces of origin or inscription to let us know more about the story of the carvings.

In the roman province of Pannonia, according to the National museum in Budapest, there was a “pre-roman” tradition saying, that dead people was transported into death on a wagon, which is why many tombstones/stelai show a carved wagon along with the grave inscription. Often the type of wagon used is the four-wheeled transport-wagon, as seen on the photo left, but in a few cases, where supposedly dealing with more wealthy persons, the two-wheeled wagon-type, as seen on the photo right, is used. This latter wagon-type is also seen on some city-roman sarcophagi, in a bit different output, though. Here the type is called “Sessel-wagen” in German, but I have not been able to find neither the English nor Latin word for the wagon-type yet. The Latin name would be crucial, though, if one were to make a full typology of the roman wagon types.

A roman carving is not only a marble-plate with a few cut-marks, it is a piece of art designed to play a part in a given context, which means the motive shown on a carving (most often) deliberately is put there to “tell a story”. In triumphal art scenes with triumphal processions and captured enemies and goods (trophies) is showed, and burial art can have carvings showing mythical scenes, often with dying or sleeping persons, or they can show scenes from the life of the buried person. 

In most kinds of roman art, transportation-carvings (scenes with some kind of transportation) are represented, and they are therefor treated as one group here. The group has two parts, each concentrating on land-transport and water-transport, which will be treated separately. In the case of land-transportation more carvings from the roman empire, mostly from the burial art though, are taken into discussion, and the same goes more or less for the water-part.

In both parts more types of vehicles are shown, to prove that any picture given on a marble-plate not necessarily is some kind of “standard” carving.

Yesterday, rogueclassicism had a piece from the Times which concerned the Etruscan chariot in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

This post is only here to bring a photo (see left) of the wagon mentioned in the article. It is clearly another type of wagon than the one in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, mentioned in an earlier post, also in the media because the Italians want it shipped home to Italy.

More info on this wagon on www.metmuseum.org