Chariot Linchpin with a Hedgehog
Unknown · c. 2000-1800 BC
A tiny hedgehog perches on top of this bronze pin, its spines rendered as a pattern of hatched lines. The pin is a linchpin, the piece pushed through the end of a chariot axle to stop the wheel from sliding off, and it is pierced so that a cord or a smaller pin could hold it in place. It stands just under thirteen centimetres tall.
The linchpin was found at Susa in the central courtyard of the later palace of Darius, together with its twin, a bronze wheel rim and the skeleton of a horse, a find that suggests an animal buried with its vehicle in the early second millennium BC, around two thousand to eighteen hundred BC. Such a burial points to the value placed on chariots and horses in Elam long before the Persian kings. Why a hedgehog was chosen is unclear; the animal appears elsewhere in Near Eastern art and may have had protective meaning. Both pins came to the Louvre through the partage of finds from the French excavations.
Did You Know? The two hedgehog pins were found still lying with the horse that once pulled the chariot.
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