No Wheels? Get a Camel

The Book of Mormon describes wheeled vehicles and horses, but when the Spanish conquistadores came they did not find either. Strange?

Perhaps, but another culture gives a good example of wheeled vehicles giving way to more efficient means of transportation.

Carts, wagons, and chariots were the earliest and most common means of moving people and cargo for hundreds of years in countries in the Middle East, but camels began to replace all types of wheeled vehicles beginning at the time of Christ.

Most of the Middle East had converted to camel transportation by the end of the fifth century, A.D. Eventually, with the spread of the Islamic religion, camels became the chief source of transport as far away as Spain.

These are the findings of Dr. Richard W. Bulliet, assistant professor of history at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The research was published in Aramco World Magazine, a publication of the Arabian-American Oil Company.

Although we now think of deserts and camels in the same thought, Dr. Bulliet believes camels were domesticated by nomadic tribes only a few hundred years before the birth of Christ.

With eventual military might, nomads introduced the camel to neighboring kingdoms. But it was not military strength that converted the merchants from wheels to camels. It was economics.

When it proved impossible to develop a harness that would link a camel to a cart, the camel was put into competition with oxen. But oxen required more food, and it took scarce wood to build carts.

Early economists figured that camel transportation was about 20 percent cheaper than wheeled transportation. Acting on that information, the Roman emperor Diocletian ordered a price freeze in the third century that favored camel operators.

Eventually carts, wagons, and chariots—even many roads—disappeared.

Camels “ruled the road” for hundreds of years. It was only in some areas of Turkey that carts remained a strong competitor because of the influence of traders from the north.

But it was not until the advent of European influence that carriages began to replace camels as transportation for people. Even then the camel remained as the chief means of moving freight.

It was only the development of the automobile that moved the camel out of the transportation picture, Dr. Bulliet notes, although camels are still the prime source of transportation for nomadic desert tribes.

Eventually the camel will probably be only a meat supply for even the most primitive tribes, and may finally be relegated to the zoos of the world.