Quote:Is there not another name for the 2 humped camel?
Camelus Bactrianus is the official name, as opposed to the
Camelus Dromedarius. Aristotle was the first westerner to recognize the differences, which are immense:
A dromedary...
...comes from the hot deserts and the steppes of Arabia
...has one hump
...has long limbs
...has short hair, which protect against the heat
...is a swift runner
A camel...
...comes from Bactria, Sogdia, and the Gobi desert only, which have a land climate
...has two humps, which insulate it from heat loss
...has short limbs
...has short hair, which protect against the cold
...is useful as a transport animal
The confusion is created because in Semitic languages, the dromedary is called
gamal (cf. "Gaugamela" = dromedary's back). The Greeks had two words for the dromedary: their own word,
dromedarios, and a loan word,
kamêlos. Aristotle was the first to use the second word for the two-humped animal; all languages have accepted the difference, but in English the difference appears to have been lost before the early twentieth century - witness the
Camel cigarette box, which shows a dromedary.
That two-humped animals were not well-known in the west before the rise of Islam, means that the famous Jewish proverb that "It is easier for a
kamêlos to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10.25; Babylonian Talmud, Berakoth, 55b and Baba Mezi'a, 38b) refers to a dromedary, a biological fact that appears to have escaped almost every translator of the Bible.
I have never seen a representation of a camel in a collection of Greek or Roman art, except for one oil lamp in the museum of Worms.
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![[Image: dromedaries.jpg]](http://www.livius.org/a/1/iran/dromedaries.jpg)
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