ABSTRACT AND INTRODUCTION T he present paper owes its origin to an inquiry made in the spring of 2012 by Charles Higgins, a young student of Reed College, Portland, Oregon, who was writing his B.A. thesis (completed in December 2012) on Indian chairs and modes of sitting under the guidance of my friend Edwin Gerow. Charlie, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Portland in March 2013, asked me about the seats of Harappan deities seen on the Indus seals, and about Dravidian words for chairs and thrones. While going through Burrow and Emeneau’s Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, I was struck by one of the relevant words, in which I saw a possible new etymology for the Sanskrit words śakaṭī- and śakaṭa- ‘cart’: it seemed to fit very well the archaeological evidence of Indus carts, and had to be published. I decided to chart the early occurrences of these Sanskrit words rather comprehensively to ascertain the exact meaning and to find all the recorded uses of this type of cart. I have tried to collect exhaustively all Vedic attestations of these words; while presenting the material below, I have in each case included quite a lot of the contexts, as these describe the cart, its constituent parts and the associated actions. For easier recognition I have printed all occurrences of the word śakaṭī-/ śakaṭa- in boldface. At the end of the Vedic section, I present some evidence suggesting that the use of cart in the marriage and royal ritual may date from Harappan times. Here I also cite some attestations from post-Vedic literature, where śakaṭa- is connected with the Rohiṇī asterism. I present in full the epic evidence as well. Of the Mahābhārata I include also the passages not incorporated in the critical edition; the material of the Rāmāyaṇa and On Ancient Indian Ox-Carts, Biers, Beds and Thrones: À propos of Sanskrit śakaṭī-/ śakaṭa- and its Etymology Asko Parpola 1