Note 13 — Chapter II · A Far-travelled Invention

When the wheel was introduced into Japan, hand-made pottery was in use for religious purposes, and for long afterwards the vessels used at Shinto shrines were not turned on the wheel. In India, hand-made pottery was similarly reserved for religious worship after the wheel-made variety came into use.13 The wheel did not reach southern India until its Iron Age.14 When the southern India Iron Age began is uncertain. It was not, of course, an “Age” in the real sense, but a cultural “stage”. Iron was known and apparently in use during the Aryo-Indian Vedic period in the north.15