Saddle of camel: North Arabian model

By about 1000 B.C.E. the camel caravan was a common sight throughout the deserts of southwest Asia, regularly ferrying passengers and goods through the oven at the world's crossroads. But saddle designs adequate for carrying loads couldn't support a rider at full tilt. Until camels could be ridden well enough to be used in battle, the caravans were at the mercy of brigands on horseback operating from isolated oases deep in the desert. Between bribes to pass safely and the cost of an armed escort, camel herders were unable to reap the full benefits of the lucrative trade they carried and remained socially unimportant.

A new saddle design completely changed the course of Middle Eastern history. The North Arabian saddle, invented around 300-500 C.E., straddled the hump with a sturdy frame. Cargo could be loaded on and behind the hump and a rider could perch before it, his stability assured and within easy reach of the reins. Furthermore, seated atop the two-meter high withers of the camel, a rider could effectively wield a lance.

Camel herders quickly seized control of the caravan trade from the bandits and city merchants, and soon desert kingdoms emerged across much of Arabia. The most important of these was Mecca, which before 500 C.E. was little more than an oasis. Growing rich off the incense trade, by the time of Mohammed's birth in 570 C.E. it was a regional capital. With economic, military, and religious power in their hands, the camel herders of the Hedjaz were clearly in the ascendant.

Saddle of camel: on hump designs

Riding was never a priority for the first camel owners. When necessary, people and belongings were haphazardly and inefficiently perched around the animal's swaying hump. But early saddling techniques prevented the camel from competing as beast of burden. Besides, there was no need for it in littoral camel-herding communities.

But money makes the world go round, and the high profits to be had from trade with the emerging civilizations of the Mediterranean drove the development of a new saddle. The prevailing winds of the Red Sea make northward journeys inefficient (even the Pharoahs tried to get around this problem), and most pack animals can't handle the distances and temperatures of the Arabian desert.

By arranging blankets and ropes around the hump of the camel, it was possible to stabilize the load enough for profitable quantities of goods to be carried the 2000 miles from Aden to the Levant. It is in just these caravans that camels first appeared in Western literature, with the arrival of the Queen of Sheba bearing gifts for Solomon (I Kings 10:2) and as Rebekah's mount (Genesis 24:61). Soon, camel caravans had taken over trade routes throughout southwest Asia, ferrying goods from the Gulf, Turkey, Persia, and beyond.

History of camel: domestication

Every person who has argued over the relative merits of dogs versus cats as house pets has engaged the fundamental question of domestication: how do you get an animal to acknowledge your superiority? For some species, like sheep and goats, a herd mentality makes domestication the simple process of acclimatization. For others, like dogs, a hierarchical social structure means that establishing control is more of a play for dominance. And for some, like cats, the process is never fully complete, instead constituting a regular exchange of services.

Camels, despite their tendency to herd, are quite socially shrewd, so domestication involves the establishment of dominance and control. The first domesticators were probably fishermen on the coast of Yemen and Oman, who turned to the camel for milk around 2000BCE. They had no need to ride the animals, their semi-sedentary communities simply serving as a base for fishing expeditions, nor did they require the meat. Corralling a few females would have been easy-- getting one to let you touch its udder would have been the tough part.

As described earlier, the practice of keeping camels for milk is today only prevalent in Somalia and East Africa. The Arabian fishermen slowly turned their seafaring chops to trade, spreading the camel across the Red Sea. There, in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth, the camel could provide milk from land that was previously useless. The custom stuck, and even today Somalia is the home to the most camels of any country.

History of camel: dominance and collapse

If the camel's close relationship to man was foreshadowed by the two species' concurrent, countercurrent, then the camel's fate during and after the last Ice Age was a sure signal of things to come.

By the middle Pleistocene, Camellus included at least seven different species spread across southern Europe, North and East Africa, the Middle East, and most of Asia. Although each differed in morphology and environment, osteological and ecological clues tell us that, by and large, they lived much as camels do today. Their adaptations to aridity gave them access to untapped resources and protected them from most predators. But periodic ice ages drove declines in the marginal areas the camels enjoyed most, pushing them into closer contact and competition with other herd animals. Humans, always ready to eat anything big and easily hunted, didn't help.

By the beginning of the Holocene (12,000ya) most camel species were extinct, and the others had been driven into small refuges. In southern Arabia, the dromedary survived only in the hilly fringes of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter. The Bactrian, like Lama, took refuge in the mountains of Central Asia. And some scholars hold that a third species remained in the Atlas mountains of Morocco and Algeria until the introduction of the domestic camel. In any case, the precipitous climate and human-fueled decline of Camelllus is an apt analogy for the problems the animals face today.

Source: Wilson RT. 1984. The Camel. Essex: Longman Group.

History of camel: evolution and speciation

The mammals emerged during the Triassic, around 225 million years ago. For 160 million years they were the dung beetles of the reptile world, relying on their small size to stay out of the way of T. Rex. But things changed when earth's collision with a massive asteroid 65 million years ago made life tough for large cold-blooded animals. Diversity of form and function that had been lurking under the saurischian-dominated surface was let loose, and within fifteen million years after the advent of the Age of Mammals the world was populated by a whole new array of exotic and quixotic animals.

On the plains of North America, the rabbit-sized ancestors (the Poëbrotheriinae) of the camel family gradually increased in size in the Eocene, grazing on grasses and forming into herds for protection. By the Middle Oligocene (around 30 million years ago) the family had diversified and spread across the New World and Asia, most of its members of a size and shape similar to modern camels.

The Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene (20m-12tya), the great age of apes, was a time of consolidation and expansion for the camel. Most genii died out in the face of new environmental conditions, but two-- Lama and Camellus-- specialized and thrived. The former moved into the isolated mountains of South America, where it today survives as the llama, alpaca, guanaco, and vicuna. Camellus, on the other hand, was a little more adventurous. Crossing the Bering sea land bridge in the early Pleistocene, it emerged onto the arid steppes of Asia and thrived. As Camellus conquered the Old World, it surely must have encountered the other ascendant genus spreading across the world's plains: Homo.

Source: Wilson RT. 1984. The Camel. Essex: Longman Group.

History of camel: use for draught

In his fascinating book The Camel and the Wheel (1975), Richard Bulliet of Columbia-Ahmadinejad fame musters an impressive body of camel-knowledge to argue that the efficiency of the camel as a pack animal is largely what drove the disappearance of the wheel from Middle Eastern cultures since Roman times. By coordinating economic, political, social, and, interestingly, camel saddling aspects of Middle Eastern societies, he convincingly shows that the invention of the North Arabian saddle allowed nomadic camel-herders to begin to dominate overland trade routes. This dominance in turn triggered the abandonment of the less-efficient cart. The expansion of Islam reintroduced or solidified the role of the camel across North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia, and these societies, by and large, discarded the wheel in favor of the more efficient pack camel.

In India, however, cultural familiarity with the wheel was stronger, and even in the most arid, camel-friendly reaches of the Thar desert the cart survived, in all of its oxen-, donkey-, and camel-powered varieties. The camel cart is commonplace on the streets of Bikaner, still used alongside tractors and trucks. The most important selection criteria in the NRCC's complicated method for evaluating the suitability and value of male camels are those related to draught ability. Pack camels, once the lifeline of this desert city, are now only used to transport that most agreeable and easily-loaded commodity: tourists.

Here, a typical camel cart after transporting feed to the main corral. Note the saddle, an Indian pakkra. I took the photo during a sandstorm:

Saddle of camel: early stages

In this day and age many people have had the opportunity to sit atop a camel for a few minutes or days, as tourist operators the world over have realized the appeal these strange animals hold to the Westerner intent on experiencing the Orient. What we don't realize as our thighs chafe, backs ache, and butts get sore is that the piece of wood and cloth separating us from the ugly brute tells us everything we need to know about the history of the camel in that area.

Most of the time, you'll be perched behind the camel's hump, sitting atop the sacrum or pelvic juncture. This method is the easiest to learn and the most comfortable for those without the right callouses, and as such is preferred for first-time riders like tourists or the earliest domesticators.

These were fishermen of coastal Oman who turned to the camel for its milk. When the animal was ridden, it was with a simple mat tied behind the hump. Later, this padding was refined into a full-fledged saddle. Both of these designs are dominant in Somalia and East Africa, where camels were introduced at an early date and are still kept primarily for milk. In Arabia, however, there was to come a more efficient design that would change the role of the camel forever.

Source: Bulliet, R. 1975. The Camel and the Wheel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.