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Cart


A cart is a vehicle designed for transport, using two wheels and normally pulled by one or a pair of draught animals. A handcart is pulled or pushed by one or more people. It is different from a dray or wagon, which is a heavy transport vehicle with four wheels and typically two or more horses, or a carriage, which is used exclusively for transporting humans.

Over time, the term "cart" has come to mean nearly any small conveyance, from shopping carts to golf carts, without regard to number of wheels, load carried, or means of propulsion.

The draught animals used for carts may be horses or ponies, mules, oxen, water buffalo or donkeys, or even smaller animals such as goats or large dogs.

Carts have been mentioned in literature as far back as the second millennium B.C. The Indian sacred book Rigveda states that men and women are as equal as two wheels of a cart. Hand-carts pushed by humans have been used around the world. In the 19th century, for instance, some Mormons travelling across the plains of the United States between 1856 and 1860 used handcarts.

The history of the cart is closely tied to the history of the wheel.

Carts were often used for judicial punishments, both to transport the condemned – a public humiliation in itself (in Ancient Rome defeated leaders were often carried in the victorious general's triumph) – and even, in England until its substitution by the whipping post under Queen Elizabeth I, to tie the condemned to the cart-tail and administer him or her a public whipping.


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