68 STEPPES AND DESERTS. 



(9) p. 4. " The Ship of the Desert." 



In oriental poems, the camel is called the land -ship, or 

 the ship of the Desert (Sefynet-el-badyet) ; Chardin, Voyages, 

 nouv. ed. par Langles, 1811, T. in. p. 376. 



But the camel is not merely the carrier of the desert, and 

 the link which, rendering communication between different 

 countries possible, connects them with each other : he is 

 also, as Carl Bitter has shewn in his excellent memoir on 

 the sphere of diffusion of these animals, the principal and 

 essential condition of the nomadic life of nations in the 

 patriarchal stage of national development, in the hot parts 

 of our planet where rain is either altogether wanting or very 

 infrequent. No animal's life is so closely associated by 

 natural bonds with a particular stage of the developement of 

 the life of man, a connection historically established for 

 several thousand years, as the life of the camel among the 

 Bedouin tribes" (Asien, Bd. viii. Abth. i. 1847, S. 610 und 

 758). " The camel was entirely unknown to the cultivated 

 Carthaginian nation through all the centuries of their 

 flourishing existence, until the destruction of their city. 

 The Marusians first brought it into military use, in 

 the train of armies, in Western Lybia, in the times 

 of the Caesars; perhaps in consequence of its employ- 

 ment in commercial operations in the valley of the Nile 

 by the Ptolemies. The Guanches, the inhabitants of the 

 Canary Islands and probably related to the Berber race, 

 were not acquainted with the camel before the ] 5th century, 



