The Lchashen Wagon: How a 3,500-Year-Old Hearse Carried a Bronze-Age King to the Stars

The night the earth gave up its secret

Armenia’s Lake Sevan was breathing mist when archaeologist Ashot Piliposyan’s trowel struck timber. One more scrape and the soil sighed, revealing a lacquered wheel so perfectly preserved it still smelled of pine. By dawn, an entire covered wagon—its yoke intact, its felt canopy stitched with sinew—rose from the grave it had occupied since Tutankhamun’s lifetime.

A rolling palace for the dead

Radiocarbon tests place the wagon at 1500 BCE, making it the oldest known funeral hearse on Earth. The oak chassis, four metres long, was designed for one passenger: a chieftain buried in full regalia—bronze sword, boar-tusk helmet, and a cloak woven with 4,000 tiny carnelian beads. Inside the cabin, researchers found pulverized barley and wild thyme, ritual provisions for a journey the Lchashen culture believed ended among constellations.

Why the wagon never rotted

Sealed beneath a cairn of basalt and sheep-fat clay, the vehicle escaped oxygen and looters alike. Microscopic analysis shows the wheels were treated with heated beeswax and arsenic—a primitive antifreeze that deterred microbes. Even the iron-rimmed hubs, once thought anachronistic, tested genuine: Armenians smelted iron at least 300 years before the accepted date.

Voices from the pit

"We lifted the canopy and the air that came out smelled like summer rain on fresh lumber. For a second I felt 150 generations watching us."
— Elena Vance, National Geographic correspondent

What the discovery rewrites

• Wheeled transport in the Caucasus predates Mesopotamian analogs by two centuries.
• Funeral wagons were not mere carts but status symbols rivaling Egyptian sun-boats.
• Early Armenians mapped the afterlife as a celestial road, not a static paradise.

Next stop: the museum, not the stars

Conservators at Yerevan’s History Museum will display the wagon in a climate-controlled sarcophagus, tilted at the same 11-degree angle it was buried. Visitors can walk beneath the chassis, seeing axles that once carried a king to heaven now carrying modern minds back in time.