The Etruscan Wagon in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

Troels Myrup (at iconoclasm) had, Sunday, a post on the ongoing investigation of “stolen” artefacts from Italy, asking if the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is standing next in line. One of the artifacts in question is the newly re-exhibited Etruscan wagon from a Sabine-village.

The wagon, as seen in the exhibition “Middelhavshorisonten” (here on the left), is some kind of a “ritual-wagon”, but only metal-fittings from the wagon are now to be seen, along with other artifacts from the grave, in the large exhibition case. As seen on the photo, the wagon is reconstructed in a glass/metal-like material with most of the original iron-parts placed on the floor. The exhibition of this wagon is a job done in co-operation with the Italian archaeological authorities and the local museum from the Sabine-area, with whom the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek have had a good collaboration since the 1970’s.

It is nice to see so much energy and attention put into this, in danish collections, unique wagon, but I think the exhibition is missing a model of this wagon, in which non-preserved parts (of wood) should be reconstructed as good as possible. This wagon does not look like most preserved wagons and chariots from the Etruscan area, which is why, I think, it is important to “bring the wagon to life” and show the museum-guests the meaning and function of this wagon, before it was stashed away in a tomb.

 

Does Ancient Ships and Wagons share methods of research?

The idea of this weblog is, as mentioned more than once, to learn more about roman transportation, especially wagons and transportation on land.

But ancient transportation also includes ships and seafaring, which is why posts on this material now will be introduced on this blog. The water-transportation material is parallel to the wagon material, and the different groups of archaeological evidence (original parts and iconography) are the same as in the case of the wagons (in my opinion, anyway). Therefore, I think, the ship-research, which, in many cases, is more discussed than the research on wagons, can be useful in the methodical part of research on roman transportation in general.

Any progress in this “new” topic will be noted on this page and categorized under “Water Transport”.

 

The Roman Suspension System - an other angle

In my post on the suspension system I was most concerned with what I see as evidence for the system - especially from the iconography. In this post I will introduce another carving, which, to my knowledge, haven’t been used in the discussion on roman wagon-construction.

The carving, as seen here on the left, is a small carving originally from Rome, but now in the Swedish nationalmuseum in Stockholm. It shows two persons driving a four-wheeled wagon in a city-area. Besides details of the buildings in the background and the traffic in the street, the carving has some interesting details on the wagon itself. Underneath the wagon, what might be two construction-details are visible: the axle between the rear wheels and an interesting part (detail on photo below) bending upwards, close to the front wheel, from underneath the wagon. The last wagon-part might be the wooden part of the suspension system, shown without the Gurthalter or ropes, but in the right place and angle according to the reconstructions made of roman wagons.

Naturally a wagon this side would need more than one “wooden arm” to give the needed suspension, but this detail could indicate, that the carving is dealing with (rich?) people in an above average wagon. At least it is safe to state that the roman stone-worker, in this case, was concerned with details.

If the detail we see in this carving really is a part of the suspension system, we can add yet another carving to the iconographic material showing the Roman Suspension System, only this time - it is seen from an other angle..

 

Paper on roads and praesidia

Saturday, Adam Bülow-Jacobsen was one of the scholars giving a paper at a theme-day on “Roman Egypt” held in the association of classical archaeologists (Danish: Klassisk Arkæologisk Forening) in Aarhus, Denmark. He was especially concerned with the road between Coptos (on the Nile) and Berenike (at the Red Sea) and the Praesidia, like road-stations, on this road.

Being a papyrologist Bülow-Jacobsen was not so much concerned with road-construction, but more with “literary” finds. It was interesting to follow his work on the road system in the eastern desert, though.

For more information please check out what Troels Myrup Kristensen, who also gave a paper here, writes on his blog.

 

A “PS” on the suspension system post

Got a comment on the suspension system post, saying it was a bit difficult perhaps to understand the discussion without having read the article on the “Roman Traction System”. Therefore this small quotation from the article, showing what initiated the debate. Hope it makes it all more clear.

In the part on Wagon Construction it says:

One interesting fact to be learned from this is that no evidence of a pivoting front axle or a suspension system can be seen in the iconography and mosaics of the period. The reason for this lies in the fact that most views are carved from the side, probably by stone masons who had little interest in the technical detail

So far, I still agree on the point of the pivoting front axle, though. I haven’t seen that one in the iconography.

 

The Gurthalter and the Roman Suspension System

Originally it was my plan to wait a few posts before getting into a discussion on the roman suspension system on wagons and carts. I wanted to show/discuss some of the wagon-bronzes and their purpose, before actually discussing the suspension system itself.

David Reads comment on my quick-post about the Internet-article: “Roman Traction Systems” made me realize, that this web-log need some more pictures (and posts), especially (perhaps) of carvings, to show what my thesis is all about, and therefore the discussion of the suspension system might be a good place to start.

The primary archaeological material in my thesis is what I earlier on called “the “roman pictures” of roman wagons”, and here I am most concerned with the roman carvings. The group of roman carvings with wagon-scenes is quite large, and it is represented in as well imperial art in Rome as in the grave-sculpture (tombstones and sarcophagi) of common people in the northern roman provinces. It is in this last group we, most often, find some detailed carvings of roman wagons.

A detailed study of all the, to me, known (published) carvings is what I am doing in my thesis, and therefore this post mainly concerns some carvings showing the suspension system. But first a word on the suspension system it self.

The suspension system on roman wagons is a much discussed area of the wagon-construction. Röring et al. presented the system in the late 1970’s early 1980’s reconstruction of the wagon from the Wardertal, Macedonia (now in Cologne/Köln, Römisch-Germanisches Museum). This wagon-reconstruction is mainly made on the basis of metal-finds, which is the same situation as two other wagons that I have knowledge of: The reconstruction of a two-wheeled cart in the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest, and a reconstructed part of a wagon in the Intercisa Múzeum in Dunaújváros, south of Budapest, Hungary. In the last case the reconstructed part is only the small front-section of the wagon whereto the metal-fittings belong.

As Dr. Weller and David Read mentions in the Roman Traction System-article a lot of bronze-fittings for the suspension system have been found across the roman provinces and they are often given the German name “Gurthalter” (I have not yet seen an English name for these metal parts). They exist in more forms, with one or two “arms”, and have various kinds of decoration, some including bronze statuettes. A one-armed is shown on the photo left and a two-armed type is used in the reconstruction of the wagon from Dunaújváros (see photo).

Now for the iconographic part.

I have found some examples of carvings in which I belive the Gurthalter is shown. In the begining, before I saw the carvings my self, I was not sure about the small details I saw in other persons photos. Now after having examined the carvings my self and knowing these details are parts of the original carvings, I do not doubt, that we actually have roman iconography showing this particular detail of the roman wagon construction.

Three carvings, one in Belgium and two in Hungary, show a detail which most of all is to be characterized as a “Gurthalter”. The wagons are all seen from a sideview and therefore only the metalpart, the Gurthalter itself, and not the wooden construction underneath it is visible. Of the three carvings only the one from Belgium (here below) show the function of the Gurthalter; here a rope, the one giving the suspension, is tied to the Gurthalter.

 

Roman traction systems

Searching for articles on wagon-construction in roman times, a much referred hit is Dr. Judith A. Weller et al. on the “Roman Traction System“. It is an article on www.humanist.de, but so far the only article here related to roman wagons and land-transportation. A lot of pages concerning the roman empire has a link to this article. Now I’ve made this link, too.

The article is most concerned on the traction systems, but it has a chapter on wagon-construction, which, besides a few errors, is interesting reading. Including good pictures.

 

The archaeological evidence 3 - The roman roads

Working with roman wagons you have to make a note on the roads. A lot of scholars around the world have been working on this subject and therefore I will not spend that much energy on the roads themselves.

The roman roads are, no doubt, one of the greatest works of engineering in the ancient world, not alone for their stability and longtime durability but also for what they carried along ex. bridges, tunnels and caves in mountain-areas. The roads are also one of the main reasons why the romans could keep the control of an empire stretching from the River Rhine to the Sahara dessert and from the Atlantic Ocean to the River Euphrates, because they guarantied the infrastructure and thereby secured the possibility of moving large troops a long distance in a short amount of time. (Click here to find out more about the roman roads)

However, my interest in the roman roads concern the tracks of usage discovered in many original road-pavings around the Mediterranean. Here below are some examples of roman roads with marks of wagon-usage. These four roads, and the one shown in the blog-header, are all roman roads found in Italy, but there are also known roads from the roman provinces around the Mediterranean. The roads are, from the left; from Pompeii (the city area), Via Amerina (outside Falerii Novi), Rusellae (the forum area), Vulci (the road towards Ponte Rotto) and the header is from Ostia Antica (main road). All photos are my own.

 

The archaeological evidence 2 - The “roman pictures” of roman wagons

The romans made a lot of pictures of how they saw the world and everything in it, and this gallery include pictures, in different quality, style and medium, of various kinds of roman wagons. Therefore we have a large material in this category of archaeological evidence. 

The roman pictures include carvings, paintings and mosaics showing roman wagons, two and four-wheeled vehicles, with/without people and/or goods, wagons in (or in no) motion and pictures with various kinds of wagonparts, mostly wheels. Some of these pictures happen to be very detailed and they are therefore, in my opinion, great evidence in the study of roman wagons.

Here below are some examples of roman picture-work showing roman wagons. All photos are my own.

1. Detail of roman wheel. Carving, Arlon, Belgium

2. Detail of roman wagon. Carving, Budapest, Hungary. 

3. Mosaic showing a fourwheeled wagon, photo in Saalburg, Germany.

4. Bronzemodel of lower part of a wagon, Bonn, Germany

 

The archaeological evidence 1 - The wagonparts

First thing first; In a thesis concerning roman wagons the first set of evidence need to be the wagons themselves.

In this part the archaeological evidence is, in my opinion, grouped in three different kinds of material:

1. The wooden parts
2. The iron fittings
3. The wagonbronzes (decorative)

The wooden part is the greatest part of the wagon, but it is actually the group of material of which we have the weakest knowledge because of the bad preservation of wood in most archaeological areas and excavations. Luckily we do once in a while find wooden material and in a few cases these bits are wagonparts. Often the wooden wagonparts found is some part of a wheel. It might be because we know how the wheel or a part of it should look like and we therefore recognises it, or it might be due to the fact that wagonwheels in roman (and medieval) times where used to form the bottom part of wells in more areas, which means they had perfect conditions for preservation and thereby survive to our days modern excavations.

There are some known pieces of wooden wagonparts in Italy, but most of the preservated wagonmaterial of wood is found in the northern roman provinces and is therefore now located, among others, in Germany and The Netherlands.

The iron fittings on the other hand is mostly known from archaeological finds in graves or deposits, especially from graves in Hungary and Bulgaria, and from the roman limes in Germany, where a deposit of iron fittings from parts of roman wagons have been found by Neupotz.

The iron parts are used to strengthen the wagon, which means most wagonfittings are used around the wheels and movable parts. Some ironfittings are also used as plates on the upper part of the wagon, but such plates are more common in the next group of wagonparts; the wagonbronzes, which are, for the larger part, ornamental elements in the construction of roman wagons.

The wagonbronzes are often seen as a decorative element in the wagon construction but they sometimes have a more important role to play in the wagons function and comfort.

Wagonbronzes are usually found with other wagonparts in graves and deposits, but because of their economic and ornamental value some are also found in houses and as single finds without any relevant context. On the function of some interesting bronzes I shall return in another post.