In more recent times
scholars have remarked upon the absence of wheeled vehicles in Muslim lands. E.
Lévi Provençal, a specialist on Muslim Spain, has written that “there seems to
have existed in the Muslim West, at least throughout the Middle Ages, of a kind
of interdiction on use of wheeled vehicles for which it would be interested to
find a plausible explanation”; [E. Lévi Provençal, Historie de l’Espagne
musulmane [Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve, 1953], III, 93] and in a study of
Moroccan agriculture Jean Le Coz writes “it is known that traditional Morocco did
not know roads, in the sense of laid out and constructed route of circulation,
or even practically the use of the wheel.” [Jean Le Coz, Le Rharb; fellahs
et colons [Rabat: Ministry of Education of Morocco and Ministry of
Education of France, 1964], I, 354] For medieval Egypt S. D. Goitein has
observed that “carriages, so common in the Roman period, had completely
disappeared and are nowhere referred to in the Geniza papers.” [S. D. Goitein, A
Mediterranean Society, vol. I, Economic Foundations [Berkely:
University of California Press, 1967], p. 275] Similarly, it has been noted
that records of the Crusader states in the Middle East never mention carts and
wagons.
Further testimony of
this sort could be sought out, but the general picture of a dearth of vehicular
traffic from Morocco to Afghanistan is already clear. The question, of course,
is how far back in time this wheelless society extends. A type of evidence that
dates back further than most travel accounts is pictorial representation. In
studying Islamic art one of confronted on the one hand, by the extreme rarity
of representations of wheeled vehicles of any kind except in Indian and Ottoman
miniature paintings which reflect milieux that never lost the use of the wheel;
[One painting by the famous artist of the sixteenth century Bihzad shows a
completely realistic and credible horse-drawn cart. The design of the vehicle,
however, shows it to be a Central Asian Turkish araba. This is a sign of
the reintroduction of the wheel to the Middle East by the Turks, and the fact
that the araba is so rarely depicted indicates how resistant the culture
of the area was to this reintroduction. For further discussion, see chapter 10.
Thomas W. Arnold, Bihzād and His Paintings in the Zafar-Nāmah Mr. (London:
Bernard Quaritch, 1930(, pl. IX. A second credible vehicle, one with four
wheels, is shows in a Persian miniature of the sixteenth century [Monstra d’Arte
Iranica: Roma—Palazzo Brancaccio 1956 (Milan: “Silvana” Editoriale d’Arte,
1956), pl. 103). Unfortunately, the horses drawing it have been so completely
consumed by a dragon that the harnessing method cannot be determined] but, on
the other hand, one finds that those vehicles which are depicted appear more
often than not in legendary scenes inspired by pre-Islamic sources and show
utterly irrational modes of harnessing. One scene from the Shahnameh, the
Iranian national epic, for example, shows two horses harnessed to a two-wheeled
cart by chains extending from a loose, lassolike collar around the horse's neck
to the hub of the wheel. There are no shafts, no yoke, no tongue, no reins, no
bridle, nothing that would indicate how the horses were to be guided or how
they were actually to pull the cart without strangling themselves. As for the
wagon itself, it seems to be a box or casket, complete with little legs, set
upon two spokeless wheels of unguessable construction. [Collection of the Fogg
Art Museum #1955.12] In short, the picture is pure invention, and the artist
had never laid eyes upon a wheeled vehicle. The same deduction can be made from
other pictures, as well. One shows a mule rationally harnessed with a rather
interesting horse collar, but the vehicle it is drawing rolls on tiny
nonrevolving wheels and is attached to the mule in such a way that it could not
turn very easily. [Ernst J. Grube, The World of Islam (London: Paul
Hamyln, 1966), p. 92] Another artist shows some comprehension of a horse collar
but none at all of how it is used to hitch an animal to a cart. [René Patris, La
Guirlande de l’Iran (n.p.: Flammarion, 1948), p. 30] Still another shows no
definite attachment between horse and cart at all. [Arthur Upham Pope, ed., A
Survey of Persian Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938], V, p. 832D]
Once again the conclusion is clearly that most medieval Muslim artists did not
know what a cart looked like from their normal, everyday experience. [European
depictions of vehicles and harnesses are not always highly accurate, either,
but enough reasonably decipherable pictures exist to give a good impression of
the main lines of technological development.]
Finally, there is the
linguistic evidence. Prior to the fourteenth century there is but one word in
Arabic for all wheeled vehicles. That word is ‘ajala, and derives from a
root connoting swiftness. [M. Rodinson, “Adjala,” Encyclopaedia of Islam,
new ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960-), I, 205-206] This word appears on rare occasion
in medieval Arabic works to describe either the vehicles of foreign peoples or
certain extraordinary vehicles that appear from time to time in Islamic
history. It is also used occasionally for a kind of water wheel, irrigation
being, along with pottery, a field in which the technology of the wheel never
suffered a recession. What is significant about the use of the word ‘ajala
is not simply the rarity of its occurrence, although this alone goes very far
toward confirming the absence of wheels in the medieval transport economy, but
the fact it was the only word in common use. Although carts and wagons were
known from ancient times in Iraq, Egypt, and Syria, no word denoting such a
thing passed into Arabic from the languages of these conquered areas. One word,
in fact, markavthā, from a root meaning “to mount,” means, among other
things, a wheeled vehicle in Syriac, while the related word in Arabic, Markab,
means a riding animal, a saddle or other animal-borne vehicle, or a ship, but
not a wheeled vehicle. Clearly the additional meaning found in Syriac had
become obsolete by the time the Arabic language expanded into Aramaic or Syriac
speaking territories. (Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel [New
York: Columbia University Press, 1990], 9-10, 14)
Roads are the second
area in which the camel’s impact on a wheeled economy can be observed in
concrete form. What is important here is not which routes were traversed. In
the Middle East desert caravan tracks were in use for centuries before the camel
replaced the wheel. In North Africa the camel would have become the common
carrier on Saharan trade routes regardless of its effect on wheeled transport.
And in Central Asia the camel dominated the caravan trade without eradicating
the wheel as it was used in agricultural districts or for moving the belongings
and portable homes of migrating nomads. What is important is not the choice of
routes; it is their actual physical state.
Camels, donkeys, and
pedestrians do not need paved roads. Given that throughout the zone of the wheel’s
disappearance the climate is dry during most of the year, it is more
comfortable to walk on dirt. Furthermore, natural obstacles, such as boulders,
do not have to be removed to provide for a constant minimum width, nor do ruts
have to be filled in. Cost of maintenance is as negligible as cost of construction.
In a non-vehicular economy the most important physical features of a road are
its bridges. One bridge in place of a ford or ferry can make an enormous
difference in the east and cost of transportation. After bridges, the most
important features are accommodations for travelers. A regular daily stage of
travel for a caravan does not exceed twenty miles, and a good road will afford
a stopping place at the end of every stage, whether it be a town, a village, or
a caravanserais, the physical upkeep of roads is insignificant; but bridges and
caravanserais themselves can be very costly.
The reflection of
this state of affairs is everywhere apparent in the history of the Islamic
Middle East. References to the upkeep of roads are almost nonexistent, but powerful
dynasties frequently show their interest in promoting trade by building bridges
and caravanserais. [One of the few individuals who ever displayed an interest in
the upkeep of roads was the Persian heretic Bihāfrīd who was executed in northeastern
Iran in 749. The fact that upkeep of roads and bridges was remembered as one of
his prescriptions would seem to testify to its being an unusual concern at that
time. E. G. Brown, Literary History, I, 308-310] Investment in these two
things is functionally equivalent to roadbuilding in a wheelless society. There
is no need to search for an ideological explanation for a nonexistent neglect
of public ways. Middle Eastern governments acted with complete rationality in
investing in bridges and caravanserais instead of in useless grading and
paving.
In the case of roads,
as in the case of medieval urban topography faced by modern automobile traffic,
what was rational and desirable in a nonvehicular society has proved to be
highly undesirable in the wheeled economy of modern times. In Europe, road improvements
and advances in vehicular design went hand in hand. Heavy vehicles drawn by several
animals meant that load size could be greatly increased over the quarter ton
limit imposed by the pack camel, but their efficiency would only be fully
realized on roads that were straight, level, and paved. Consequently, the
infrastructure of carriageable roads that Europe took into the period of the
industrial revolution far outstripped what the Middle East had going into the twentieth
century. [The mileage of carriageable roads in Iran in 1914 was still extremely
limited. Issawi, ed., The Economic History of Iran, 1800-1914, pp.
203-204] Almost all non-Western countries, of course, have been faced with the
need to build a network of motorable roads as a prerequisite for modernization,
and many areas are endowed with much greater physical obstacles than is the
Middle East, which is dry, devoid of forests, and relatively free of rivers.
Strictly from the Middle Eastern perspective, however, it is evident that the
area would have entered the period of modernization with a much better road
system had it not been for the dominance of the pack camel and the absence of
wheeled vehicles. Given the vital role of transportation in the
industrialization process, both for centralizing manufacturing and distributing
manufactured goods, it is possible that this deficiency was crucial. (Ibid.,
227-28)
