The Intimate Bond (26 page)

Ultimate Desert Pack Animals

Camels have a series of physiological adaptations that allow them to survive for long periods without water. Their humps are reservoirs of fatty tissue that minimize the insulating effect of fat that would otherwise be distributed all over their bodies. Their red blood cells are oval rather than circular, allowing better cell flow during dehydration. The same cells also allow the beasts to ingest large quantities of water in remarkably short periods of time. A six-hundred-kilogram (thirteen-hundred-pound) camel can drink two hundred liters (fifty-three gallons) of water in three minutes. Thanks to a complex of arteries and veins lying close to one another, camels are also able to withstand the major swings in desert temperatures. They can lose a quarter of their body weight to dehydration, compared to the 12 to 14 percent of most mammals. Thick coats and long legs insulate them from intense heat radiating from the ground; their leathery mouths enable them to feed off thorny desert plants. A camel's gait prevents it from sinking into sand; a third eyelid enables it to dislodge dust from its eyes. Never was an animal better adapted to life in arid and semiarid lands or to life carrying loads.

Domestication

By about 3000
BCE
, human predation had driven wild camels to near extinction in Africa, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia.
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Who first domesticated them is a mystery. The historian Richard Bulliet believes it was hunting groups living in enclaves along the Southern Arabian coast. There they subsisted off seafood and occasionally hunted camels that had adapted to a predator-free regime of extreme heat. A classic scenario developed: isolated camel populations unafraid of humans living nearby, ever-closer familiarity with small herds and individual animals, then the corralling of more docile females and their young. Why tame camels at all? Given the arid environment, Bulliet makes a case not for their meat, but for their milk, commonly drunk by Somalis and others to this day. Quite when the changeover occurred is a matter of guesswork—perhaps between 3000 and 2500
BCE
.

With milk in high demand, there may have been no need to load or ride camels until the hunters became full-time herders attuned to the realities of finding graze. It was then, perhaps, that they turned to their now-tamed beasts as at least part-time pack animals. Their camels provided milk and carried baggage from camp to camp in landscapes far from the cities of Mesopotamia and the Nile. Centuries passed before the camel came into more general use, although people were certainly aware of it. Crude depictions appear in the Nile Valley and farther afield in the Levant between about 2500 and 1400
BCE
. A fragment of camel hair rope came from a gypsum works in Egypt dated to about 2500
BCE
, although this could, of course, be an import from elsewhere across the Red Sea.
²
Most likely, a few camels brought occasional loads of goods from southern Arabia, but were never bred farther north. Camel bones from the ninth century have also come from a copper mining site in southern Israel's Aravah Valley. The ultimate catalyst for the camel revolution—in the end it was nothing less—was the Arabian incense trade.

The Lure of Frankincense and a Matter of Saddles

Frankincense is a highly prized aromatic resin obtained from the hardy
Boswellia
trees that thrive in Southern Arabia and on Socotra,
off the Horn of Africa. Insatiable demand in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and throughout Southwest Asia supported a lucrative international marketplace supplied by ships and camels. The Egyptians used frankincense for eye liner and temple incense for thousands of years. A famous mural in Queen Hatshepsut's temple at Luxor in Upper Egypt commemorates a maritime trading venture down the Red Sea to the Land of Punt (probably Somalia) in about 1458
BCE
. In it, sailors are depicted loading sacks of frankincense aboard a ship. The Red Sea is dangerous for sailing vessels both on account of strong headwinds and the same piracy that plagues its waters to this day, so an arduous overland coastal route may also have extended up the sea's eastern shore. The lucrative incense trade expanded rapidly in the hands of Semitic merchants. By 1200
BCE
, camel breeding had taken hold outside Arabia. The trade was held back by the lack of a load-carrying saddle that really worked.

For centuries, the only camel saddles were mats tied on with ropes. Now incense traders had to confront the issue of the hump.
³
Theoretically one could put a load atop it, but the hump shrinks during a desert journey. The first pack saddles were cushions placed over the hindquarters, held there by a girth extending forward. These enabled the driver to ride the camel on long journeys. The experiment worked. By Assyrian times, in the first millennium
BCE
, camels had become commonplace in Mesopotamia, figuring largely in both the incense trade and, increasingly, the battlefield. During the reign of Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727
BCE
), booty from Arabian rulers such as Queen Samsi allegedly included thirty thousand camels, twenty thousand head of cattle, and five thousand spice bundles—a rich haul indeed.

Another saddle also came into use, a horseshoelike cushion surrounding the hump, with a saddlebow and horizontal wooden struts, which provided a means for tying on loads. This saddle may have originated from strategic needs, for riders who fought from the saddle. The hump-based design was closer to the neck, offering better control of the beast. A fighting rider was also much higher from the ground. Why two saddle types? Perhaps the rear one was for load carrying, the hump-based form for military purposes. No artist has left us a record. In practice, the camel was too insecure a platform for either a lancer or an archer, so the animal was used mainly for carrying military baggage.

Figure 13.1
  A Tuareg nomad with his camel, wearing a North Arabian pack saddle. Trevor Kittelty/Superstock.

The revolution came between 500 and 100
BCE
, when a new camel saddle transformed the course of desert history. Richard Bulliet calls this the North Arabian pack saddle, after the place where it was invented.
⁴
Two large arches like inverted
V
s lie atop two pads, the one in front of the hump, the other behind it, connected by sticks forming a rigid framework converging at the top with the hump in the middle. The rider sits on a pad set above the frame, his weight distributed evenly not on the hump but on the beast's rib cage. If you want to carry a load instead of a person, you simply suspend two packs on either side of the frame.

It's very easy to claim that ancient inventions revolutionized history in a simple cause-and-effect relationship, but the North Arabian saddle's full impact on history came only when camel breeders became fully integrated into wider society. This was not easy, on account of long-held prejudices against desert nomads among both farmers and city dwellers.

Blurring the Desert and the Sown

Even with saddles, desert raiders with bows and arrows were no match for caravan guards armed with iron weapons. The profits from the trade stayed with the merchants, not with the nomads who sold and rented beasts to them. During the second century
BCE
, the military
balance changed when the attackers acquired long stabbing spears and moved in atop their beasts, mounted on North Arabian saddles. Soon people such as the Nabataeans, living on the northern fringes of the desert, gained the ability to control desert trade. They built a caravan city at Petra, in what is now southern Jordan, as early as 332
BCE
. The Greek geographer Strabo described the Nabataeans as “not very good warriors, rather being hucksters and merchants.”
⁵
Petra probably controlled the northern part of the Arabian route.
⁶

In 105
CE
, Emperor Trajan absorbed Petra into the Roman Empire, much of the trade being diverted farther north, to Bosra, in what is now southern Syria, which flourished as a Roman caravan city.
⁷
By the second century
CE
, other cities such as Palmyra became prosperous as waypoints on the caravan trade between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River. The incense trade declined with the rise of Christianity during the second century, in a world where there were now four kinds of commercial locations: production centers, places that consumed product, transshipment points that often served as crossroads, and dues-collecting stations such as customs posts. Mecca became the most famous organizing center. Its rulers forced local tribes to cooperate with caravans rather than raiding. A location with an important shrine, Mecca was far from major imperial powers and achieved considerable prosperity long before the rise of Islam in the eighth century.

By the fourth century
CE
, Arab merchants used their camels not only to equip caravans—there were, after all, limits to the scale of such operations—but also to compete in the transport business in an eastern Roman Empire that was much more closely integrated into the desert. Camels could heft quarry stone, transport grain from the fields, and carry goods to market much more reliably and across more difficult terrain than the wheeled cart. By late Roman times, camel transport was 20 percent cheaper than that by wagon, taking into account the cost of fodder and of building the vehicle. A shift in military power and the breaking down of ancient cultural barriers between desert and sown land, and the existence of the North Arabian saddle, meant that the camel replaced wheeled transport across a huge swathe of the eastern Mediterranean world. Long before the rise of Islam, the camel, the
donkey, and the mule were the load carriers of city dwellers, farmers, desert nomads, and armies.

Into the Sahara

The Ancient Egyptians inhabited a linear kingdom, where the transport of goods and people proceeded by water. As we have seen, the donkey also played an important role in Egyptian trade, carrying incense and other commodities from ports on the Red Sea to the Nile and to oases west of the river, perhaps even as far as the Lake Chad region. Both camels and the experience to breed and operate them crossed the Red Sea, perhaps from the port of Leuce Come, which lay opposite the Egyptian harbor of Myos Hormos that was operated by the Ptolemies. Camel breeding in Africa probably began in the hinterland between the Red Sea and the Nile, and then spread southward into the Sudan. By the first and second centuries
BCE
, camel caravans operated along desert routes east of the valley, but it was not until Roman times that indigenous rather than Arab camel nomads, such as the Beja of the northeastern Sudan, assumed greater military and political power. Camels became increasingly important components of the transportation economy of the settled lands.

Here again, new saddle designs came into play. Unlike the North Arabian saddle, which developed in response to military needs, the Saharan saddles were for long-distance riding. A rider atop such a device could use his feet to control his beast by putting pressure on the neck. Such saddles developed from North Arabian designs as camel nomads penetrated the southern Sahara, all the way from the Nile to as far west as Mauritania, a desert route without major obstacles.

Exactly when the camel came to North Africa is a matter of controversy, but there was little or no caravan traffic along the coast, as travelers usually preferred to go by sea. Most likely, camels reached the north from the desert and ultimately from the Sudanese region. At first the number of beasts was small, obtained by sporadic contacts between Romans and desert nomads. It was not until the first or second centuries
CE
that the Romans gained access to large numbers of camels. Not
being enamored of caravans and not being drinkers of camel's milk, they used the animals for other purposes. They needed draft animals to haul carts and to turn the tough soils of Tripolitania and southern Tunisia, and for use in battle. A circle of crouched camels makes for an effective laager for infantry. To the Romans, the camel was a pack animal, a commodity, not a ridden beast like those prized by its nomadic Berber owner.
⁸

The Golden Trade of the Moors

No one knows when the first camel caravans traversed the central and western Sahara, but it must have been before Islamic armies conquered North Africa during the seventh century
CE
. What had once been obscure tracks now became well-trodden caravan routes controlled by Muslim traders with a far wider outlook than that of their predecessors. Thus was born what has been called the “Golden Trade of the Moors.”
⁹
Each fall, camel caravans plodded southward from Sijilmassa in Morocco to Taghaza in northern Mali, where they picked up cake salt from nearby mines. Salt was, and still is, a precious commodity for West African farmers, who lack local supplies of it. From Taghaza, the caravans followed familiar paths to Walata, Ghana, and Jenne, on the Middle Niger River. There they picked up gold dust, mined from auriferous gravels in the Bambuk region of the Senegal River.
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