In the late Vedic period, against the background of a wider social and political re-casting, both the use and the image of this vehicle undergo a process of specialization: the chariot plays a role within the great royal rituals, already as an attribute of power, as it will remain in medieval times. More precisely, this vehicle functioned as a sacred space “in motion.” In the Ṛgvedic period, the chariot, representing an allegory of movement, figures in various poetic semantic fields. Throughout Vedic times, the “chariot was not merely a practical instrument for conveying persons, but an object vested with religious significance and symbolic values” (Sparreboom 1985: 1). This provides the background for an analysis of the ways in which the motif was reused in later times, as for example, in South Asian medieval contexts. Moreover, it aims at supplying a picture of the semantic fields that words for “chariot” and its parts have been associated with. This chapter points at the different meanings that the motif of the chariot assumed in different historical strata of the Vedic corpus.

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