Revived wheels

in wheels Abiding Bishoprics deployed
some armours light, recalling age-old way
of ancestors, who tyred the open plain;
so ancient forms of riding they revived

(as always, draft material!) 

An old (and small) chestnut in discussion of the Iliad: chariots. Most of the time, the poem's prominent warriors who use chariots seem to use them to get around the battlefield, but not to fight. Plus, Homer seems uncertain about much of the detail of how chariots might work.

As a result, some have suggested that the chariots in the Iliad represent a cultural memory of elite-status chariot warfare that had disappeared in practice when the poem was composed—not a million miles away from (e.g.) the funeral armour hung up in seventeenth-century England for dead knights, men who had certainly never put on a full suit of armour and in some cases had never been soldiers.

Now, that theory about the Iliad might or might not be right. I don't especially mind. You can certainly build counterarguments: maybe Homer says little about chariots' workings because it's assumed knowledge &c. But I find it interesting.

Mecha anime itself has a famous instance of an archaising revival of ancient driving traditions: Victory Gundam's Duker Iq, who spearheads Zanscare efforts to use wheels for everything, including wheels that mobile suits can sit inside like giant monocycles, and huge wheeled battleships. (I think the old screenshot at this post's head is from a fairly stilted fan translation, but it's the line that's lodged in memetic memory.)

So I figured it might be fun to imply in a few digressive lines that one of the factions on the [redacted] possessed a sort of Homeric cultural memory of wheeled military elites, perhaps linked to a semi-nomadic period in their past.

(Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright does feature 'chariots', practical front-of-battle ones, but the word seems to mean something like a small mobile armour (in Gundam terms), or sub-flight systems like the Dodai II that giant robots can dock to and ride on while using their additional weapons. Chariots in the poem also appear in space only, under normal circumstances.)