Throne-like armchairs and wagons in the bronze age сultures of the circumpontic area

The recent discovery of two wagons and an unusual chair looking like an armchair attributed to the Novotitorovka culture (grave 21, kurgan 4, Mezhkirpilsky I burial ground in the steppe Kuban region), and likely analogies to this find in the Yamnaya and Catacomb assemblages from the Black Sea maritime steppes and the Fore-Caucasus as well as the Bedeni culture in Georgia raise the issue of emergence of a special, prestigious form of the funerary rite with the use of two wagons and an armchair that looks like a throne. Likely replicas have been found further to the south in Mesopotamia (the Ur cemetery). A special cult of the throne existed among the Hittites; for example, two wagons and a throne feature in the Hittite kingly funerary rite is known from written sources. The chronological priority of such finds in the Novotitorovka culture (2900-2800 СalBC) regarding kurgan 3 of Ananauri (2400 CalBC) attributed to the Bedeni culture, and, in particular, Hittite tablets dating to 2000 BC argues in favor of development of this rite among the steppe kurgan cultures with its subsequent dissemination in the South Caucasus and Anatolia. This fact is interesting for reconstruction of social processes in various Bronze Age cultures as well as clarification of the routes via which speakers of Indo-European dialects penetrated the Anatolia-Mesopotamia region.