Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Interesting Excerpts from Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel

  

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)