by Brian Fagan
The Mongol empire depended heavily on horses. Every tribe, every army, engaged in a constant gavotte between people, their animals, and droughts or cold snaps that could kill hundreds of animals in a few months. Horses cut travel times across the harsh steppe, expanded territorial boundaries by a factor of five, and allowed people to exploit widely distributed raw materials and grazing grounds. But every temperature change and rainfall shift altered the relationship. Drier periods brought stunted pasture, decimated herds, and led to extended searches for grass and water. Inevitably, warfare increased as tribes encroached on one another’s territories. In milder, better-watered years, territories became smaller, the carrying capacity of grazing land improved dramatically, and fighting died down. Those who lived on the fringes of the steppe lived in constant fear of drought years, when fierce nomads driving animals would arrive without warning, creating mayhem from horseback as they sought better pasture.
The endless rhythms of warm and cold, plentiful rain and drought, ample grass and no forage, were a major engine of history in Eurasia, dictated in large part by a close relationship with the horse. When drought on the plains coincided with unrest and brilliant generalship by the likes of Genghis Khan, the foundations of history shook—all because, thousands of years in the past, some bold young men dared jump on the back of recently tamed horses and ride them. Genghis Khan was well aware of the vulnerability of his domains. He tried to move his empire away from its dependence on the horse and the irregular cycles of drought and rainfall that governed life on the steppe. In this, he and his successors were at least partially successful.
Toppling an Emperor
Genghis Khan started his conquest of China with small-scale raids across the Huang He River. In 1209 he accepted the surrender of Emperor Li Anquan of Western Xia. Two years later, he declared war on China’s Jin Dynasty, crossed the Great Wall, and ravaged northern China. He captured Beijing in 1215. A grandson, Kublai Khan (who reigned 1260–1294), completed his conquest. Born the year Genghis captured Beijing, he was largely brought up by his mother, the remarkable Sorghaghtani Beki, who “trained all her sons so well that they marveled at her powers of administration.”12 Genghis Khan’s eldest son, Mongke, became great khan, and gave his brother responsibility for China. Sorghaghtani Beki made sure that Kublai understood that the best way to govern the Chinese was by enlisting their support, thereby acquiring revenue from their rich farmlands. The Mongols already controlled northern China, so her son’s first task was to conquer Sung-controlled, densely forested southern China. There was a stalemate until 1253, when Kublai captured Dali and outflanked the Sung army.
Kublai was elected great khan in 1260, at a time when disunity had descended on the Mongol Empire. He promptly moved his capital to Beijing and declared himself emperor of China, despite competition from the southern Sung, who were not finally defeated until 1279. There was no way the Mongols could govern China, so he allowed the Chinese to administer themselves under Mongol supervision. There was a huge cultural gap between Mongol and Chinese, so Kublai and his successors maintained strong ties with the steppe and also relied on foreigners to control the bureaucracy. He also strove to improve communications. Fifty thousand horses, thousands of oxen and mules, four thousand carts, and six thousand boats connected fourteen hundred postal stations. Couriers on horseback wore bells that warned of their approach and the need for a replacement mount. Such men could cover 400 kilometers (250 miles) in a day.
Mongol rule deteriorated rapidly after Kublai Khan’s death in 1294, a victim of perennial clashes between pro-Chinese and steppe-oriented factions. The Ming emperors, who restored the Chinese imperial tradition in 1368, suffered from just as many equine shortages as their predecessors. By the fifteenth century, they were importing ten thousand head annually and continued to do so for over a hundred years. Their trading partners were usually uncooperative. The Mongols often sent only gelded and well-used ponies between four and eight years of age, preferring to keep the mares for themselves. The few females that did come south were apparently crossed with donkeys to produce mules for pack and draft purposes, a telling commentary on Chinese priorities. They were, after all, predominantly farmers, who left little space for pasture. Even when the military reserved areas for grazing horses, the people complained that the reserves were depriving farmers of their livelihood. Inevitably, the largest grazing areas were close to the northern borders, where raids were a constant problem.
A profound ambivalence surrounded Chinese attitudes toward horses. They became a military essential, but many authorities assumed that soldiers were unaccustomed to riding.13 Some of them were indeed superb horsemen, but one gets the impression that riding horses was considered a foreign practice, except along the northern and western borders. Chinese art is revealing, for many of those who handled and tended horses appear to be non-Chinese. There was bureaucratic attention certainly, an organization set up to acquire horses, but the entire operation over many centuries appears to have lacked true passion. Many Chinese cavalrymen never seem to have acquired a close relationship with their beasts either in the face of Mongol invasions or in later centuries. Apparently, they never mastered the true art of managing and riding horses, or of fighting with them; so, inevitably, the nomads of the north conquered them. Never did the importance of a close partnership between human and beast have greater significance.
Ships of the Desert
CHAPTER 13
“Animals Designed by God”
Someone once described camels as horses created by committee. They had a point, for they can carry double the load of an ox at twice the speed and cover much greater distances. They are faster than donkeys and can travel for long distances without water across searing hot terrain. Few animals had a more profound effect on history.
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.1 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 Vs 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 fee
t 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.10
