An ancient king's war chariot found in a tomb near Rome has helped rewrite the history of the Romans and their Sabine rivals .

"This chariot is an exceptional find," said archaeologist Paola Santoro .

"It shows that the city of Ereteum remained independent long after the Sixth Century BC." "In other Sabine cities like Custumerium, conquered by the Romans, the custom of putting regal objects in king's tombs had died out by that time" .

"We can say that Eretum kept its independence until the Fourth Century BC." Santoro said her team had recovered all the metal parts of the bronze-and-iron decorated chariot and had used echo-soundings to trace the imprints of the long-decayed wooden parts .

"This will enable us to reconstruct the whole chariot," she said .

The chariot, which accompanied the king on his last journey, was placed at the entrance to the tomb, the largest chamber tomb ever found in Italy .

Santoro's team have also found an Etruscan-style terracotta throne - "a metre high, worthy of the king's stature" - and four large bronze cauldrons with bull-hoof supports .

Less than a dozen of this type of cauldron had been discovered before, Santoro said .

The tomb was found in the main room in the three-room complex, next to a wall recess where a wooden coffin containing the king's ashes would have been placed .

The horses that had drawn the chariot would have been sacrificed at the entrance to this room, Santoro said .

Before the discovery of the Sixth-Century BC tomb, two years ago the Eretum dig uncovered a rare religious symbol used by Sabine high priests .

Some scholars think the holy object, called a lituo, was also used by kings of the Sabine tribe, one of Rome's earliest rivals and one which provided the city with its second king, Numa Pompilio .

Only two other examples of the lituo had been found - although it is seen quite often on funerary vases .

The sacred rod, a sort of curved stick, was believed to be a tool which helped priests trace out an area of the sky for watching birds whose passage would determine important decisions such as where to found a city .

Archaeological evidence of the Sabines has until now been extremely scarce and much of the stories about them have been considered legends - such as the famous Rape of the Sabines, in which Rome's first king Romulus sent an expedition to carry off Sabine women to provide wives for his desperately woman-short settlement on the Tiber .

The discovery of the object, some Italian experts believe, provided evidence of how Sabine religious usages shaped the formation of Roman institutions .

It is plausible to suppose that for some time the kings of Rome, many of them from another semi-mysterious tribe called the Etruscans, used the same religious rites as the Sabines and were in fact priest-kings, archaeologists think .