There’s been a lot of discourse lately about how the undersides of Hot Wheels toy cars have become more simplified over time; as someone with a longstanding and deep-seated interest in the undersides of toy cars, this post got me thinking about toy cars, and checking my stashes of toy cars to scrutinize their bottoms, a phrase that, taken out of context, will likely not look good for me.
As I was looking up older and older toy cars, I soon found myself sliding down a well-greased rabbit hole and found myself at the absolute bottom: the oldest toy car ever found.
Really, it’s not just the oldest toy car ever found, it seems to be the oldest toy of any kind ever found! And it sure as hell seems like a car, even though, you know, it was made thousands and thousands of years before there was anything even remotely like an automobile. Still, look at it:
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The “car” is a fired-clay artifact from what is known as the Chalcolithic period, which is also sometimes known as the Copper Age, as this is the era when the first usage of copper had been found. Really, this era is the first time that any metallurgy had been used, as this age was directly preceded by the Neolithic Era, or “new stone age.”
This toy is old. It’s estimated to have been built sometime between 5500 and 3000 BCE, and while that is a huge possible range, it means that it could be between 7,500 and 5,000 years ago, meaning at the newest it would roughly be from the period of the first Egyptian dynasty.
The toy was recovered at Kızıltepe in Türkiye, which would have been part of ancient Mesopotamia. The toy very likely represents some manner of animal-pulled cart of the era, but what really strikes me is just how much it looks like a show rod or dragster from the 1960s, especially in the way the wheels are staggered. Again, look at it:
It feels like some kind of T-body rat rod, with the narrow-set front wheels, the wider track/wider wheel rear, and what looks like a sort of cab behind a longer hood.
The illusion holds from the side, too; it feels like a car with a long hood, big wheels, and a short-ish cab. If I were to try and make it look even more like a car, I think I’d do something like this:
That’d be a pretty fun show rod, right? I mean, for something based on a 6,000-year-old styling inspiration, I think it works.
Of course, that’s nothing like whatever this was originally supposed to represent. I think those raised sides were likely to represent the walls of a wagon-like cart, and perhaps the “cab” was actually some sort of bench for a driver, holding the reins of an ox or aurochs or some other sort of animal? In my re-imagining of it as an automobile, I suspect I have the orientation backwards.
Were those axles original? I’m amazed at how well this seems to have been preserved, being found in some mound out there, not even in a tomb, like some other ancient wheeled toys and objects have been found. In fact, there have been a number of extremely old wheeled toys found, across cultures, even in cultures like Mesoamerican ones where wheels were not used at larger scale, mostly because of uncooperative terrain and a lack of suitable beasts of burden to pull wheeled vehicles.
Wheels and toys just go together. My kid’s first word was “wheel,” even. Wheels are just fun. For something that has proven so crucial to the technological growth of our species, I feel like this is an important thing to remember.
Top graphic images: Bizsiziz.com; DepositPhotos.com
“The toy very likely represents some manner of animal-pulled cart of the era,” Fun fact: if the dating is correct, we have zero archaeological evidence of there being any “animal-pulled carts” of that era. The toy predates the common, evidence-supported estimates for the invention of the full-scale wheel.
Here’s a 3d model of the car in case anybody wants to 3d print it: https://www.meshy.ai/s/TsiPk4
Damn that’s neat, thanks! Looks like that thing has a rear axle pumpkin??
Are we sure it’s not an ancient dealership demo model? Seems like it’d sell 2x the wheels comparied to a chariot.
It looks to me like a horse drawn harrow.
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/y2fkYZO9k4o/maxresdefault.jpg
It was probably pulled by woolly mammoths
It’s made of clay… phew. The topshot looked like a creepy amalgam of bones, which had me imagining some cybernetic cockroach earthling 6000 years from now playing with a quadcopter made of skeleton bits and scrap wire, spinning propellers made from someone’ phalanges and saying “Bzzz bzzz, I’m a human from way back in the 2100s!”
Sorry. I’ve been reading the news too much lately.
Take that toy boats, dolls and toy soldiers;
Oldest toy is a car!
Property of Bam-Bam Rubble.