Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 199 



camel corps, "all riding on camels not inferior in fleetness to 

 horses." On some Assyrian bas-reliefs men mounted on camels 

 are seen flying before Assyrian horsemen, and we may without 

 hesitation recognise the former as Arabs. 



To the mind of Aeschylus 1 all the south-eastern part of Asia 

 Minor was .inhabited by Indians, who, men and women alike, 

 roamed from place to place on camels which were ridden like 

 horses, but carried pack-saddles. It may be of course urged that 

 Aeschylus in this passage is alluding not to the Arabs, with 

 whose name he was acquainted, as he mentions them elsewhere, 

 but that he is rather thinking of the Bactrians, who would not 

 inappropriately be termed Indians. But it must be remembered 

 that the Bactrians supplied horsemen and no camels to the army 

 of Xerxes, and that it is only in later writers such as Pollux 

 that they are described as fighting on camels, which were swifter 

 than horses, more calculated to inspire terror, owing to their size 

 and shagginess, and better adapted to rough work from not 

 suffering from thirst 2 . From this it looks as if in the fifth 

 century B.C. the Bactrians either had not yet begun to use the 

 camel, or at least had not as yet utilized it for war. Pollux 

 evidently regarded the Bactrian custom as exceptional, for he 

 says that whilst the horse and the elephant are only used for 

 war, asses were employed as pack-animals, oxen for draught, 

 mules for both, whilst camels also carried baggage on pack- 

 saddles. There are two quite distinct species of camels, the 

 Bactrian (Camelus bactrianus) with two humps, and the 

 Arabian (C. dromedarius) with only one : though zoologists 

 denominate the Bactrian only as Asiatic, it seems certain that 

 both are such in origin, the former being found in Upper Asia, 

 the latter in Arabia, where, as we shall soon see, wild camels 

 still existed in Strabo's time, for there is no need to assume 

 that all the wild camels then existing there were feral. At the 

 present day there are no wild camels in Arabia ; there are, how- 

 ever, wild Bactrian camels in Lob-nor in Eastern Mongolia (p. 26), 



1 Supp. 280-2 : 'Ii/5ous r O.KOVCO vo/j.d5as 



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2 i. 140-1. 



