Potter's Wheel Invented

Around 3500 BCE, Sumerian potters in Mesopotamia developed the tournette, a slow-turning wheel rotated by hand or foot while coiling clay vessels. A stone potter's wheel excavated at the city of Ur has been dated to approximately 3129 BCE. By the mid-to-late third millennium BCE, the fast wheel emerged, operating on the flywheel principle — stored energy in the heavy stone disc enabled a technique called throwing, where potters shaped clay from a centered lump. The wheel's application to transportation came roughly 300 years after its use in pottery production.