Wheelbarrow in Roman times ?

[Cacaius]

Hello

I have just seen this website
http://www.newyorkcarver.com/inventions2.htm
which says that wheelbarrow is medieval invention.

Is it really medieval ? No sources for wheelbarrows in ancient times in Europe ?

[Chuck Russell]

i know our 15thc group has what is called a barrow. no wheel, and carried by 2 peopled

[Tarbicus]

Putting a wheel on a barrow seems pretty straightforward, surely someone thought of it? Or did they have two wheeled handcarts?

[D B Campbell]

The arrival of the wheelbarrow in medieval Europe is one of these vague facts that no-one can quite pin down. (Cf. the stirrup?)

For example, the excellent The Ancient Engineers, by the late L. Sprague de Camp (he of "Conan" fame), states that:

"Jugo Lyang, a general and inventor of the time of the Three Kingdoms (+III), is said to have invented that valuable if humble vehicle, the wheelbarrow. However, because of the semi-isolation of China, these inventions have sometimes taken many centuries to reach the West; it took the wheelbarrow a thousand years." (p. 314).

I have just been reading "The origins of the wheelbarrow" (Technology & Culture 35, 1994, pp. 453-475), by engineering-scholar Michael Lewis.

Basically, he shows that, unlike the names of other vehicles, "wheelbarrow" shows no linguistic progression from Latin into modern languages. If the Romans had had the wheelbarrow, we'd expect our word to be derived from a Latin word. But there doesn't seem to be one. (The word "barrow" has Old Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Lombardic and Frankish roots.)

Then, he shows that evidence of the medieval wheelbarrow (and "handbarrow", by which he means the device used by Chuck Russel's group) goes back only to the 12th C. But writers were using a variety of terms to describe it (which reinforces the point that there wasn't an existing Roman device with a name that could easily be adopted).

All the Roman evidence points to the fact that, when not using carts and pack animals, labourers simply carried loads in containers. There is no hint that anything like the wheelbarrow existed.

So far, so good. But here's the surprise:
In the ancient Greek world, the inventories of building equipment at 5th C BC Eleusis mention something called a monokyklos or "one wheeler". Since the tetrakyklos ("four-wheeler") is known to have been a four-wheeled vehicle, and the dikyklos was a two-wheeled vehicle, it seems likely that the builders at Eleusis around 410 BC were using a wheelbarrow!

Lewis summarises his findings as follows:

"[The wheelbarrow] was created in classical Greece for carrying moderately light loads on building sites. Whether or not it was imitated in the western Mediterranean or for that matter in China, in Europe it survived the fall of Rome only in the Byzantine Empire. Here, perhaps during the Second Crusade (1147-49), it was encountered by westerners who took the idea back home with them and modified their existing handbarrow to take a front wheel." (p.475)

In conclusion, "the wheelbarrow did not, as is universally claimed, make its European debut in the Middle Ages".