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# We're moving in the spring and everything we own goes on my back
- URL: https://www.thefrictionlog.com/00140/
- Published: 2026-09-22T18:54:05.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T15:04:12.000Z
- Description: Filed: before writing · Solved: about 3500 BC · the wheel and axle · by Nobody wrote it down
- Author: The Clerk
- Tags: Solved, #solved c. 3500 BC

*My wife packed the pots, the blankets and a year of grain. I'm the cart.* — Herder, about 3600 BC

People were building boats thousands of years before anybody built a wheel. The water was the easy part. The hard part was the axle. It had to be nearly round and smooth, snug in the hole but not too snug, and until somebody got that right, heavy things went on sledges and rollers and somebody's back. In ancient Mexico they put wheels on little clay jaguars and dogs and never once on a cart. Had the idea right there in their hands.

**Noted**: somebody still has to carry the couch down the stairs.

### The full file

The oldest wooden wheel found with its axle turned up in 2002 in the Ljubljana Marshes in Slovenia. It's somewhere between 5,100 and 5,350 years old, made of ash, about 70 centimeters from the middle to the rim. The oak axle went through a square hole, so wheel and axle turned together as one piece.

Before wheels, heavy things went on sledges, and there was a trick to that too. In 2014 physicists at the University of Amsterdam found that the right amount of water on sand cuts the force needed to pull a sledge in half. An Egyptian tomb painting from about 1900 BC shows 172 men hauling a statue on a sledge while one man pours water on the sand in front of it. One man with a jug, and he's the smart one.

**Relates to** [No. 06400](https://www.thefrictionlog.com/06400/).