Ox in the context of Sakia

Road transport or road transportation is a type of transport using roads. Transport on roads can be roughly grouped into the transportation of goods and transportation of people. In many countries licensing requirements and safety regulations ensure a separation of the two industries. Movement along roads may be by bike, automobile, bus, truck, or by animal such as horse or oxen. Standard networks of roads were adopted by Romans, Persians, Aztec, and other early empires, and may be regarded as a feature of empires. Cargo may be transported by trucking companies, while passengers may be transported via mass transit. Commonly defined features of modern roads include defined lanes and signage. Various classes of road exist, from two-lane local roads with at-grade intersections to controlled-access highways with all cross traffic grade-separated.

The nature of road transportation of goods depends on, apart from the degree of development of the local infrastructure, the distance the goods are transported by road, the weight and volume of an individual shipment, and the type of goods transported. For short distances and light small shipments, a van or pickup truck may be used. For large shipments even if less than a full truckload a truck is more appropriate. (Also see Trucking and Hauling below). In some countries cargo is transported by road in horse-drawn carriages, donkey carts or other non-motorized mode. Delivery services are sometimes considered a separate category from cargo transport. In many places, fast food is transported on roads by various types of vehicles. For inner city delivery of small packages and documents bike couriers are quite common.

Cattle (Bos taurus) are large, domesticated, bovid ungulates widely kept as livestock. They are prominent modern members of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus Bos. Mature female cattle are called cows and mature male cattle are bulls. Young female cattle are called heifers, young male cattle are bullocks, and castrated male cattle are known as oxen or steers.

Cattle are commonly raised for meat, for dairy products, and for leather. As draft animals, they pull carts and farm implements. Cattle are considered sacred animals within Hinduism, and it is illegal to kill them in some Indian states. Small breeds such as the miniature Zebu are kept as pets.

The history of anatomy spans from the earliest examinations of sacrificial victims to the advanced studies of the human body conducted by modern scientists. Written descriptions of human organs and parts can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Egyptian papyri, where attention to the body was necessitated by their highly elaborate burial practices.

Theoretical considerations of the structure and function of the human body did not develop until far later, in ancient Greece. Ancient Greek philosophers, like Alcmaeon and Empedocles, and ancient Greek doctors, like Hippocrates and his school, paid attention to the causes of life, disease, and different functions of the body. Aristotle advocated dissection of animals as part of his program for understanding the causes of biological forms. During the Hellenistic Age, dissection and vivisection of human beings took place for the first time in the work of Herophilos and Erasistratus. Anatomical knowledge in antiquity would reach its apex in the person of Galen, who made important discoveries through his medical practice and his dissections of monkeys, oxen, and other animals.

Alpha /ˈælfə/ ALF-ə (uppercase Α, lowercase α) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph ⟨𐤀⟩, whose name comes from the West Semitic word for 'ox'. Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin letter ⟨A⟩ and the Cyrillic letter ⟨А⟩.

A working animal is an animal, usually domesticated, that is kept by humans and trained to perform tasks. Some are used for their physical strength (e.g. oxen and draft horses) or for transportation (e.g. riding horses and camels), while others are service animals trained to execute certain specialized tasks (e.g. hunting and guide dogs, messenger pigeons, and fishing cormorants). They may also be used for milking or herding. Some, at the end of their working lives, may also be used for meat or leather.

The history of working animals may predate agriculture as dogs were used by hunter-gatherer ancestors; around the world, millions of animals work in relationship with their owners. Domesticated species are often bred for different uses and conditions, especially horses and working dogs. Working animals are usually raised on farms, though some are still captured from the wild, such as dolphins and some Asian elephants.

In agriculture, the yield is a measurement of the amount of a crop grown, or product such as wool, meat or milk produced, per unit area of land. The seed ratio is another way of calculating yields.

Innovations, such as the use of fertilizer, the creation of better farming tools, and new methods of farming and improved crop varieties have improved yields. The higher the yield and more intensive use of the farmland, the higher the productivity and profitability of a farm; this increases the well-being of farming families. Surplus crops beyond the needs of subsistence agriculture can be sold or bartered. The more grain or fodder a farmer can produce, the more draft animals such as horses and oxen could be supported and harnessed for labour and production of manure. Increased crop yields also means fewer hands are needed on farm, freeing them for industry and commerce. This, in turn, led to the formation and growth of cities, which then translated into an increased demand for foodstuffs or other agricultural products.

Mechanised agriculture or agricultural mechanisation is the use of machinery and equipment, ranging from simple and basic hand tools to more sophisticated, motorised equipment and machinery, to perform agricultural operations. In modern times, powered machinery has replaced many farm task formerly carried out by manual labour or by working animals such as oxen, horses and mules.

The entire history of agriculture contains many examples of the use of tools, such as the hoe and the plough. The ongoing integration of machines since the Industrial Revolution has allowed farming to become much less labour-intensive.

The roller is an agricultural tool used for flattening land or breaking up large clumps of soil, especially after ploughing or disc harrowing. Typically, rollers are pulled by tractors or, prior to mechanisation, a team of animals such as horses or oxen. As well as for agricultural purposes, rollers are used on cricket pitches and residential lawn areas.

Flatter land makes subsequent weed control and harvesting easier, and rolling can help to reduce moisture loss from cultivated soil. On lawns, rolling levels the land for mowing and compacts the soil surface.

A wagon (or waggon) is a heavy four-wheeled vehicle pulled by draft animals or on occasion by humans, used for transporting goods, commodities, agricultural materials, supplies and sometimes people.

Wagons are immediately distinguished from carts (which have two wheels) and from lighter four-wheeled vehicles primarily for carrying people, such as carriages. Common animals which pull wagons are horses, mules, and oxen. One animal or several, often in pairs or teams may pull wagons. However, there are examples of human-propelled wagons, such as mining corfs.

A paddy field (or paddy) is a flooded field of arable land used for growing semiaquatic crops, most notably rice and taro. It originates from the Neolithic rice-farming cultures of the Yangtze River basin in southern China, associated with pre-Austronesian and Hmong-Mien cultures. It was spread in prehistoric times by the expansion of Austronesian peoples to Island Southeast Asia, Madagascar, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. The technology was acquired by other cultures in mainland Asia for rice farming, spreading to East Asia, Mainland Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

Fields can be built into steep hillsides as terraces or adjacent to depressed or steeply sloped features such as rivers or marshes. They require a great deal of labor and materials to create and need large quantities of water for irrigation. Oxen and water buffalo, adapted for life in wetlands, are important working animals used extensively in paddy field farming.

The acre (/ˈeɪkər/ AY-kər) is a unit of land area used in the British imperial and the United States customary systems. It is traditionally defined as the area of one chain by one furlong (66 by 660 feet), which is exactly equal to 10 square chains, 1⁄640 of a square mile, 4,840 square yards, or 43,560 square feet, and approximately 4,047 m, or about 40% of a hectare. The acre is sometimes abbreviated ac, but is usually spelled out as the word "acre".

Traditionally, in the Middle Ages, an acre was conceived of as the area of land that could be ploughed by one man using a team of eight oxen in one day. The acre is still a statutory measure in the United States, where both the international acre and the US survey acre are in use, but they differ by only four parts per million. The most common use of the acre is to measure tracts of land. The acre is used in many existing and former Commonwealth of Nations countries by custom. In a few, it continues as a statute measure, although not since 2010 in the UK, and not for decades in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In many places where the acre is no longer a statute measure, it is still lawful to use as supplementary information next to the statutory hectare measurement.

A saddle is a supportive structure for a rider of an animal, fastened to an animal's back by a girth. The most common type is equestrian. However, specialized saddles have been created for oxen, camels and other animals. The trade of making saddles is saddlery.

It is not known precisely when riders first began to use some sort of padding or protection, but a blanket attached by some form of surcingle or girth was probably the first "saddle", followed later by more elaborate padded designs. The solid saddle tree was a later invention, and though early stirrup designs predated the invention of the solid tree, the paired stirrup, which attached to the tree, was the last element of the saddle to reach the basic form that is still used today. Present-day saddles come in a wide variety of styles, each designed for a specific equestrianism discipline, and require careful fit to both the rider and the horse. Proper saddle care can extend the useful life of a saddle, often for decades. The saddle was a crucial step in the increased use of domesticated animals, during the Classical Era.

A horse collar is a component of horse harness designed to distribute the force of a load evenly across a horse's shoulders and chest, enabling efficient pulling of a load while not interfering with a horse's windpipe. Unlike earlier harness systems such as the throat-and-girth arrangement that restricted breathing and limited pulling power, the horse collar revolutionized draft work by allowing horses to exert their full strength without choking. This innovation dramatically increased agricultural productivity and transformed transportation, particularly in medieval Europe.

The collar typically encircles the lower neck in an oval shape and is padded to conform to the horse's anatomy. It supports a pair of rigid curved bars known as hames, which serve as anchor points for the traces—the straps or chains that connect the horse to the vehicle or load being pulled. By shifting the load-bearing surface to the shoulders, the horse collar enabled horses to outperform yoked oxen, making them indispensable in farming, freight, and urban development.

Bos (from Latin bōs: cow, ox, bull) is a genus of bovines, which includes, among others, wild and domestic cattle.

Bos is often divided into four subgenera: Bos, Bibos, Novibos, and Poephagus, but including these last three divisions within the genus Bos without including Bison is believed to be paraphyletic by many workers on the classification of the genus since the 1980s. The genus as traditionally defined has five extant species, but this rises to eight when the domesticated varieties are counted as separate species, and ten when the closely related Bison is also included. Most but not all modern breeds of domesticated cattle (including taurine cattle and zebu) are believed to have originated from the extinct aurochs. Others like Bali cattle and gayal are thought to have originated from South and Southeast Asian Bos species.

Acrophony (/əˈkrɒfəni/; Ancient Greek: ἄκρος, romanized: akros, lit. 'uppermost' + φωνή phone 'sound') is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic: the names of the letters α, β, γ, δ, are spelled with the respective letters: άλφα (alpha), βήτα (beta), γάμμα (gamma), δέλτα (delta).

The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Proto-Sinaitic script and the succeeding Phoenician alphabet, in which the letter A, representing the sound [ʔ], is thought to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox, and is called 'ox', ʾalp, which starts with the glottal stop sound the letter represents. The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet is bet (which means 'house' and looks a bit like a shelter) representing the sound [b], and from ālep-bēt came the word "alphabet" – another case where the beginning of a thing gives the name to the whole, which was in fact common practice in the ancient Near East.

China has been the source of many innovations, scientific discoveries and inventions. Below is an alphabetical list of inventions and discoveries made by Neolithic cultures of China and those of its prehistorical early Bronze Age before the palatial civilization of the Shang dynasty (c. 1650 – c. 1050 BC). These include the Bronze Age Erlitou culture and the semi-legendary Xia dynasty that, unlike the Shang, is not yet confirmed to have existed with evidence of contemporary texts.

The contemporaneous Peiligang and Pengtoushan cultures represent the oldest Neolithic cultures of China and were formed around 7000 BC. Some of the first inventions of Neolithic China include semilunar and rectangular stone knives, stone hoes and spades, the cultivation of millet and the soybean, the refinement of sericulture, rice cultivation, the creation of pottery with cord-mat-basket designs, the creation of pottery vessels and pottery steamers and the development of ceremonial vessels and scapulimancy for purposes of divination. The British sinologist Francesca Bray argues that the domestication of the ox and buffalo during the Longshan culture (c. 3000 – c. 2000 BC) period, the absence of Longshan-era irrigation or high-yield crops, full evidence of Longshan cultivation of dry-land cereal crops which gave high yields "only when the soil was carefully cultivated," suggest that the plow was known at least by the Longshan culture period and explains the high agricultural production yields which allowed the rise of Chinese civilization during the Shang dynasty. Later inventions such as the multiple-tube seed drill and the heavy moldboard iron plow enabled China to sustain a much larger population through greater improvements in agricultural output.