"Alexander's Tomb" by N. Saunders

[marcus]

Yes I wouldn't have thought that you would need a university degree to work out that camels have been in Egypt or around that area for a good long while. The weather is just up their street.

Of course, it could be that the non-existence of camels might simply refer to their not being used in the fertile and static-inhabited area along the Nile. Perhaps they were always around in the Libyan and Sinai deserts, but not in the Nile valley itself.

I've no evidence for that, of course - it's just a suggestion as to why there seem to be two viewpoints.

Alternatively, of course, as I suggested before, the evidence of their existence might just be later. I'm not sure how far we can use those stock phrases of the Bible as real evidence of their existence in Egypt at the time, not least because Genesis and Exodus, the two books cited, were written significantly later than the events they purport to describe.

ATB

[Efstathios]

Camels are used for domestic and transportation purposes for 3000 years now or more.

Also there are 2 types of camels.The Arabic camel with the one hump which you can see in Africa and Arabia and the Bactrian Camel with the two humps which you can see in India mostly.Surely Alexander must have used both.

Also

"Today camels are often used as transportation and pack animals in the desert, but in early ancient Egypt donkeys played that role. Camels weren't introduced until the Persians took control of Egypt around 525 B.C."

from http://www.nationalgeographic.com/egypt ... facts.html

[marcus]

"Today camels are often used as transportation and pack animals in the desert, but in early ancient Egypt donkeys played that role. Camels weren't introduced until the Persians took control of Egypt around 525 B.C."

from http://www.nationalgeographic.com/egypt ... facts.html

I wouldn't be surprised. I was told by an Egyptian camel-driver that, given the choice, he would always take a horse into the desert rather than a camel. It is only the camel's capacity for water that makes them good animals for desert work - their temperament makes them highly unsuitable for any work! (That's what he said, anyway - we were on camels, in the desert, and he chose to ride a horse ...)

ATB

[amyntoros]

Also there are 2 types of camels.The Arabic camel with the one hump which you can see in Africa and Arabia and the Bactrian Camel with the two humps which you can see in India mostly.Surely Alexander must have used both.

Good point, Efstathios. I wonder if the confusion has arisen because of the previous definition of a camel prior to the common usage of the word today. For instance, there’s an 1884 book online, A Confederate Soldier in Egypt which, quoting both Pliny and an author called Buffon, draws the distinction between the one-humped camel and the two-humped – the dromedary and the camel. In practice today we tend not to make that distinction and call either species a camel.

A Confederate Soldier in Egypt, by William Loring. Chapter 17.
They crouched around the scanty fagot fire, for it was cold, their camel's long neck between them and his nose at the same fire too. Thus camel and master passed the night. Such is the life of the wild man of the desert. If one accepts the distinctions of Pliny adopted by Buffon, where two species of animals are marked by nature with certain permanent peculiarities, there cannot be found such an animal as a camel in Egypt or in the surrounding deserts. Unlike the Bactrian, there is no animal of this kind to be seen with two humps ; you never see or hear of but one. Consequently all these animals are of the dromedary species. The name camel is universally applied to the animal with one hump in this country, and it is difficult to draw any distinction between it and the dromedary, also with one, the latter being only considered a peculiar breed. There is scarcely an Arab over these broad deserts who has ever heard of the Bactrian camel. The name gammeel (camel) is that by which he designates the most common beast of burden he has—slow and patient, of great size and strength, used in cities and on deserts for heavy loads, capable of great endurance, of living upon the coarse food found upon the deserts, and of going a long time without water. The one of graceful and delicate form, rapid in its motion, smaller and of easier gait, is called by the Arab hadjim, and by us dromedary.

Could the answer be as simple as there having been only one-humped dromedaries in Egypt before the Ptolemaic period? Lucian has a lovely little piece about Ptolemy’s “novelty” of bringing a Bactrian camel to Egypt. Now, it’s tempting to dismiss the whole thing as fiction when reading of the half-black, half white man – that rather ridiculous Star Trek episode comes immediately to mind – but I suppose he could have suffered from a pigmentation illness (the name of which I can’t remember). Lucian does say the colors are equally divided, but the man could have had color in patches rather than one half solid black and the other solid white. However, even if we allow for the above, it’s rather difficult to believe that a two-humped black camel could have frightened a sophisticated Alexandrian audience. It’s an entertaining little story, nevertheless.

Lucian. Volume VI. ‘You’re a Prometheus in Words.’ Chapter 4.
Take an example. Ptolemy the son of Lagus brought two novelties to Egypt – a completely black Bactrian camel and a man of two colours, half jet-black and half dazzlingly white, the colours equally divided. He assembled the Egyptians in the theatre, where he put on a lot of other shows for them and lastly this, the black camel and the half-white man, thinking to amaze them by the spectacle. The spectators however took fright at the camel and all but jumped up and ran away – and that though the camel was adorned all over with gold and draped in sea-purple and the bridle was set with gems, the treasure of some Darius or Cambyses or Cyrus himself. As for the man, most of them laughed, but some were disgusted as at a monstrosity. So when Ptolemy realised that he got no credit in their eyes and the Egyptians did not admire the novelty but set more store on beauty of form and line, he sent them away and esteemed them no longer as before. The camel died through neglect, and the half-and-half man he presented to Thespis the pipe-player for playing prettily at a carousel.

Best regards,

[Callisto]

Good point, Efstathios. I wonder if the confusion has arisen because of the previous definition of a camel prior to the common usage of the word today. For instance, there’s an 1884 book online, A Confederate Soldier in Egypt which, quoting both Pliny and an author called Buffon, draws the distinction between the one-humped camel and the two-humped – the dromedary and the camel. In practice today we tend not to make that distinction and call either species a camel..

Ancient People (or at least Greeks) called also both species camels but were aware of the difference, as far their humps, between Bactrian and Arabian camels.

Aristotle in his "history of animals" describes how they viewed camels at his time.

"Camels have an exceptional organ wherein they differ from all other animals, and that is the so-called 'hump' on their back. The Bactrian camel differs from the Arabian; for the former has two humps and the latter only one, though it has, by the way, a kind of a hump below like the one above, on which, when it kneels, the weight of the whole body rests. The camel has four teats like the cow, a tail like that of an ass, and the privy parts of the male are directed backwards. It has one knee in each leg, and the flexures of the limb are not manifold, as some say, although they appear to be so from the constricted shape of the region of the belly. It has a huckle-bone like that of kine, but meagre and small in proportion to its bulk. It is cloven-footed, and has not got teeth in both jaws; and it is cloven footed in the following way: at the back there is a slight cleft extending as far up as the second joint of the toes; and in front there are small hooves on the tip of the first joint of the toes; and a sort of web passes across the cleft, as in geese. The foot is fleshy underneath, like that of the bear; so that, when the animal goes to war, they protect its feet, when they get sore, with sandals"

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/mi ... .2.ii.html