The Oriental origin of the wheeled vehicle has long been recognized. It seems to have originated in Sumer, in the Uruk period, in the first half of the fourth millennium B.C.
A rich collection of material, including isolated wheels and other remains of wheeled vehicles, models and pictures representing vehicles, show that wagons and carts had spread to Italy, Eastern and Central Europe, and the south Scandinavian countries by the middle of the second millennium B.C. Although the presence of wheeled vehicles has been claimed in Spain as early as the ‘copper age’ the first datable evidence for them is given there by the Solana de Cabanas stele and other west Spanish stelae that probably belong to the end of the second and the first millennium B.C.