Alexander pledged freedom of the seas for Greek shipping, although this promise did not prevent him from occasionally seizing the odd freighter to demonstrate just who really held the straits. In the ensuing centuries, Athens, while remaining nominally independent, no longer commanded its lifelines or its fate. Just as it had invented many Western institutions and intellectual and artistic endeavors, so did it pioneer a less glorious tradition. In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past.
If Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, then surely its peculiar strategic geography informs the core of Western naval strategy, which emphasizes the security of maritime routes. Venice, then Holland, and then England became, respectively, the Athens of the thirteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries—nations which had outgrown their domestic food supplies and whose prosperity and survival hinged on control of sea-lanes and of strategic choke points as far-flung as the Kattegat (the strait between Jutland and Sweden), the English Channel, Suez, Aden, Gibraltar, Malacca, and, again and again, the Hellespont and Bosphorus.
Today, as the ever-increasing output of the vast oil fields of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran flows through the Persian Gulf, defense ministries in Washington, London, New Delhi, and Beijing need no reminders of the importance of maintaining free navigation through its narrow waters. The great medieval trading nations of Asia, on the other hand, lulled by the open geography of the Indian Ocean, never learned that lesson. The forces of Islam were indeed able for centuries to shut out the weakened and backward European states from the heart of the world’s long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean. However, this was entirely due to their conquest of the landmass of the Middle East, which denied Europe access to the Indian Ocean’s “back doors” at the Persian Gulf and at Bab el Mandeb. For example, the mighty Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad did little to protect its vital Persian Gulf choke point at Hormuz, allowing pirates to flourish there. (Nor did the early Arab empires consider the building and maintenance of roads to be within their brief.)
Whereas the Mongols and the Ming Chinese did make naval forays toward Japan, Indonesia, and the Indian Ocean, they did relatively little to secure the Strait of Malacca, which controlled trade to all points west. India’s Muslim rulers all but ignored their sea-lanes until the Portuguese were upon them, at which point Malik Ayaz, the Muslim governor of the Gujarati city of Diu on India’s west coast, frantically appealed to the Mamluk rulers of Egypt for help in ejecting the Portuguese. In 1508, the combined Mamluk-Indian fleet surprised a Portuguese flotilla in the harbor at Chaul (just south of modern Mumbai) and inflicted a stinging defeat on the Europeans. The next year, the Portuguese marshaled a larger fleet off Diu and reversed their setback, opening up the door for European domination of the vital spice trade, previously a Muslim monopoly.
Naval strategy and strength matter little when two monsoons can blow a cargo over an unobstructed Indian Ocean from Basra to Malacca. The easy, open geography of the Indian Ocean left the Muslim trading powers insufficiently prepared for the European onslaught.
The West’s ascendancy in the Indian Ocean would not be a rout; as the Muslims had already demonstrated at Chaul, they would not be rolled over as easily as the Native Americans of the New World. A few years after their defeat at Diu, a rebuilt Egyptian fleet was able to hold off the Europeans at Aden, and the Prophet’s forces retained control over the strategic Bab el Mandeb until the English finally took the port from the Ottomans in 1839. But despite the ferocity and technical sophistication of the Muslim navies, they would ultimately prove no match for the alumni of the rough schools of the Hellespont, the Kattegat, Gibraltar, and the Channel.
It is not hard to see the ghost of the Athenian obsession with the Hellespont reflected in the presence of the U.S. Navy at Bab el Mandeb and in the straits of Gibraltar, Hormuz, and Malacca, or the temporary defeat of the Portuguese at Chaul recalled by the attack on the USS Cole in Aden. But we have gotten well ahead of our story. Almost a millennium separated the Peloponnesian War from the fall of Rome, and there was yet another millennium between Rome’s demise and the dawn of Western hegemony announced by the appearance of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.
For most of the period following the fall of Rome, the adherents of a powerful new monotheistic religion dominated medieval long-distance commerce as completely as the West dominates such commerce today; the legacy of that former dominance is still all too visible.
3
CAMELS, PERFUMES, AND PROPHETS
Almost invariably, artists and illustrators portray camels in profile. . . . Seen from the front, a camel’s nose is a bulbous, rubbery snout with its upper lip sliding forward beneath it, pouching over its teeth, bulging above its shorter lower lip in such a way that as I squint, I no longer see an animal that looks anything like the way I expect a camel in profile to look full face. What I see is some other creature, something like a sea serpent or a dog-faced dinosaur.—Leila Hadley1
The technique of desert raiding should be studied by all travelers. An approaching party may be friend, but is always assumed to be foe. . . . Raiding parties are of two kinds, that whose tribe and yours have no blood-feud, and that where a blood-feud exists. Both want your camels and arms, the second your life as well.—Bertram Thomas2
If we are to believe recent geological and paleontological research, the dinosaurs met a sudden, dark, and frigid end when an enormous asteroid hit the Gulf of Mexico about sixty-five million years ago and triggered an ice age. Our warm-blooded mammalian ancestors, better adapted to the cold, enjoyed a resurgence. Around forty million years ago, one of these, the rabbit-size Protylopus, arose in North America. At the beginning of the Pleistocene epoch, about three million years ago, the Isthmus of Panama formed, allowing Protylopus to migrate to South America, where its descendants, the llama, alpaca, guanaco, and vicuña, thrive in the Andes. In North America, perhaps five hundred thousand years ago, Protylopus also gave rise to the modern camel.
The Pleistocene, which ended just ten thousand years ago, was marked by periods of intermittent but vast glaciation. During these frozen interludes the accumulation of ice in the earth’s expanding polar caps caused the sea level to drop by as much as several hundred feet, more than enough to expose the bottom of the Bering Strait, at present less than two hundred feet deep in places. This land bridge, Beringia, allowed the movement of plant and animal species between the eastern and western hemispheres.
During these exchanges in the late Pleistocene, two momentous migrations would occur: human beings moved east from Siberia into the New World, and the camel and horse crossed over in the opposite direction to Asia and onward into Africa. Both these hooved species soon disappeared from North America—perhaps falling prey to large saber-toothed cats, perhaps because of change in their forage caused by climatic oscillation, or perhaps because of the depredations of prehistoric man. Although the horse would be spectacularly reintroduced to the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors, the camel never regained its original birthplace.
Neither did the camel initially thrive in its new home in the Old World. Unlike the fleet horse, the defenseless camel has a top speed of only about twenty miles per hour—an easy meal for the lion or for any other large, swift predator. In Asia’s driest regions, particularly Arabia, the camel developed its signature evolutionary advantage: the ability to store and preserve water, enabling it to exist for long periods in the desert far from oases, where large carnivores gathered.
Camels do not store water in their humps, as is commonly supposed, but rather distribute it uniformly throughout their bodies. They are easily able to go days and, in exceptional circumstances, weeks, without water by drinking huge amounts—up to fifty gallons at a time. They conserve fluid through the remarkable ability of their kidneys to efficiently concentrate uri
ne. The first Asian camels were two-humped (Bactrian), but in the hotter Arabian and African deserts, the species evolved toward its familiar single-hump (dromedary) configuration, which reduced its surface area, thus decreasing water evaporation. The dromedary also evolved another water-conserving mechanism, the ability (unusual for a mammal) to passively raise its body temperature up to six degrees Fahrenheit during the heat of the day, minimizing water loss from sweating. To this day, dromedaries predominate in Arabia and Africa, while the Bactrian dwells in Asia.3
Initially, both varieties fought a losing battle and were saved from extinction only by the fortuitous appearance of humans. The camel is one of the few animals that can be domesticated. To be bred by humans, a species must simultaneously possess several relatively unusual characteristics: the provision of appealing and nutritious food, ease of herding, docility, lack of fear of people, resistance to human diseases, and, most critical of all, the ability to breed in captivity. Only a few animals qualify on all counts. Goats and sheep were the first livestock to be domesticated, around ten thousand years ago, followed by chickens, pigs, cattle, and finally, camels. (The donkey, horse, and dog were domesticated primarily for their transport, hunting, and military usefulness, but often wound up in the food chain as well.)4
We have little idea of how the most common crop and animal species were first domesticated, and the camel is no exception. On the basis of anthropological evidence, it seems likely that humans began drinking camel milk about five thousand years ago in the Horn of Africa, or perhaps just across the Red Sea in southern Arabia. To this day, Somalis refuse to ride camels, believing that the large, slow, ungainly beasts make their riders easy targets. Today, this region is home to the world’s largest population of camels, which are still kept only for their milk. Gradually, mankind discovered other uses for the animal: meat and leather from the males, hair from both genders, and, last but not least, transport.
Until about 1500 BC, the donkey had been the pack animal of choice. Thereafter, nomadic tribes bred camels for transport in huge numbers. If the donkey was a family sedan, able to convey light loads over smooth hard surfaces, then the camel was a Land Rover, whose huge padded hooves allowed it to carry roughly twice as much and twice as fast over long stretches of trackless waste. This capability revolutionized trade over the sands of the Middle East and through the steppes of Asia.5
A single camel driver, conducting three to six animals, can transport one to two tons of cargo between twenty and sixty miles in one day. When Tiglath-pileser III of the Assyrians defeated the Arabian queen Samsi about 730 BC, his booty included twenty thousand cattle, five thousand bundles of spices, and thirty thousand camels.6
A trader cannot simply sling heavily laden bags across a camel’s back. The animal’s soft, nonsupportive hump and swaying motion require a frame-and-mattress saddle that distributes the weight of the cargo over its back. Between about 1300 BC and 100 BC, pre-Islamic Arabian nomads refined saddles to the point where they allowed the average pack camel to carry more than five hundred pounds, and in excess of one thousand pounds for the strongest animals. The ultimate configuration, the north Arabian saddle, has been in continuous use in the Middle East for the past two thousand years.
The Bactrian camels of central Asia are just as highly specialized and carefully bred as those of the Arabian desert, having been domesticated for transport at more or less the same time, around 2500–2000 BC. The slightly cooler and wetter climates of the Asian steppes, Iran, and India favor two-humped design. But whereas the desert Arabs valued the dromedary not only for its transport ability but also for its milk, meat, and hair, central Asians did not. In that part of the world, settled agriculture had already established itself and had spread widely. Central Asians found sheep’s wool superior to camel hair, and cow’s milk and meat more plentiful and better-tasting. Further, the ox and water buffalo gave the camel a run for its money over short distances, particularly in wet climates, where camels do not thrive.
Thus, as the ancient era wore on, both the size and the range of the more highly valued dromedary population increased and began to impinge on the domain of the Bactrians: first in Syria and Iraq, then in Iran, then in India, and finally in central Asia itself. When the two populations came into contact, the laws of hybridization worked their typical magic. The two types are similar enough to interbreed, and the first-generation offspring of a Bactrian and dromedary (the so-called F1 hybrid) is, as so often happens, a beast possessed of remarkable stamina and strength, perfectly suited to the long distances of the central Asian overland trade. All along the Silk Road, demand mushroomed for these crossbred “super camels,” capable of carrying up to half a ton of cargo from China to the western fringes of Asia.
Such beasts of burden can be bred with a Bactrian stallion servicing a large population of female dromedaries, or the other way around. The pairing of a Bactrian stallion and a dromedary mare, however, is used almost exclusively, since one Bactrian stallion can service a large number of dromedary mares, the latter being far more common, even in central Asia. (A similar situation occurs with the powerful all-purpose western pack animal, the usually sterile mule, which is the offspring of a female horse and a male donkey, but for a different reason. The “reversed” F1 hybrid between a stallion and female donkey—the hinny—is rarely bred, because of the difficulties of delivering the large offspring through the birth canal of the smaller donkey mare.)
The inexorable logic of animal husbandry also demands that hardy first-generation crossbreeds not mate, as their second-generation offspring are most often small and degenerate; the Arabic and Turkish words for this second-generation crossbreed both translate as “runt.” Consequently, the dromedary and the crossbreed predominate in almost all of Africa and Asia; only in the highest and coldest mountains of central Asia, where even the hardy crossbreed cannot thrive, are pure Bactrians bred in any number.7
The animal’s continued widespread use from Morocco to India to western China attests to its extraordinary transport efficiency. In the modern era, the availability of well-paved roads allows for the even more efficient camel-and-wagon arrangement. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization estimates the present-day world camel population at just shy of twenty million (including 650,000 feral beasts in the Australian outback, whose services became redundant with the advent of the railroad).8
Although an exceptional animal and driver might cover as much as sixty miles per day, a more typical day’s span is approximately thirty miles. Given the “safe” three-day water capacity of the camel, oases and caravanserais needed to be spaced about one hundred miles apart; this greatly restricted possible routings, particularly in central Asia. Further, since camels cannot negotiate steep, narrow grades, donkeys were required through the mountain passes of the Asian route.9
We’ve already encountered one commodity, silk, that could be shipped great distances in camel packs. But for thousands of years before silk traveled from China to Rome on camels, as well as in ships, another precious cargo found its way thousands of miles from the vast Arabian desert to the ancient world’s great centers of civilization in the Fertile Crescent.
The trademark, and the curse, of the Arabian Peninsula is its hot, dry climate. Scarcely a permanent creek penetrates its desert vastness. There are only their ghosts, the parched, meandering wadis (equivalent to the arroyos of the American Southwest), often missed by even experienced travelers until these dormant streams rage as torrents during storms separated by decades.
One part of the peninsula, however, was known in classical antiquity as Arabia Felix—literally, “happy Arabia.” The name referred to the area’s fertility. Located in the peninsula’s mountainous southwest, in what is now Yemen, it catches the warm, wet winds of the summer monsoon and receives an average of ten inches of rain annually. The southwestern port city of Aden derives its name from the Arabic word for Eden, which accurately describes this rare patch of moist climate. (The rest of the otherwise arid peninsula wa
s known as Arabia Deserta.)
Incense is the general term for frankincense, myrrh, and rarer exotic aromatics that have grown for millennia in Arabia Felix. The earliest Sabaean and Minaean inhabitants, as well as peoples across Bab el Mandeb in Somalia, pioneered its cultivation and export.
Before the arrival of silk and pepper in the West, incense was the premier luxury product of antiquity. To anyone living in Arabia around 1500 BC, the most obvious use for the newly domesticated camel would have been the transport of incense to consumers in the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean basin. As far back as 3500 BC, Egyptian and Babylonian aristocrats acquired a taste for these fragrant products. Stone monuments from around 2500 BC celebrate incense-trading voyages to the land of Punt: modern-day Yemen and Somalia. The traders might have sailed the Red Sea down its entire length, but, as we’ve already seen, shallow waters, pirates, and adverse winds cursed this route. It was safer and more reliable to use the overland path north along the Arabian coast of the Red Sea, then west through the Sinai.
The growing cycle also favored the camel route. Growers harvested the crops mainly in autumn and spring, out of sync with the winter monsoon for sailing to Egypt or the summer monsoon for sailing to India, whereas the camel trains could operate year-round.10 The rigors of navigation in the Red Sea and the peculiarities of the harvests and monsoons drove the peoples of the peninsula to domesticate the camel specifically to carry incense.
The bulk of the trade consisted of two somewhat different products: frankincense, a gum resin produced from Boswellia sacra; and myrrh, a fragrant oil produced by Commiphora myrrha. Both plant species are scruffy trees several feet tall that grow mainly at high altitude in southern Arabia and neighboring northern Somalia.
Splendid Exchange, A Page 7