Caravan

a company of pilgrims or merchants associated for protection in traveling through the wastes of Asia and Africa. Before the discovery of the mariner's compass enabled sailors to venture out of sight of land, the commerce of the oriental countries was carried on overland by trains of laden camels. The cities of Asia Minor, of Syria, of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, of Persia, and of Central Asia were built up by caravan traffic as railroads build up cities today. Ur of the Chaldees, Babylon, Nineveh, Cairo, Bagdad, and a hundred other cities of the ancient world were caravan centers of enormous business and wealth. Instead of railroad trains bringing and carrying goods long trains of camels from the East brought bales of rugs, carpets, shawls, tea, spices, perfumery, and gems from Persia, China, and India, and returned laden with western products brought by similar caravans to these centers of distribution.

Caravans were voluntary associations. The village merchant or chief with a few camels joined his neighbors at a central point, and traveled on to a larger center until, at a stated time, a multitude of camels and men gathered for a journey of months to a distant emporium as their fathers before them had done for a thousand years. As many as a thousand or even five thousand camels not infrequently traveled in a single caravan, winding through the sand-hills in a file two or three miles in length. Only the richest goods could bear the expense of distant caravan transportation. It is no fanciful computation to reckon that the merchants of an opulent oriental city may have imported or shipped out goods worth a million dollars by a single caravan. Each caravan chose its own leader. Laden camels traveled from eighteen to thirty miles a day. They were seemingly indifferent to where they went and had to be kept in line by drivers or they would wander away cropping shrubs, and be swallowed up in the desert.

Caravans are still the chief means of collecting and distributing goods in the northern part of Africa and in many parts of Asia; but the immense caravan business between central and western Asia has been broken up by railroads and steamers. At present the chief commercial caravan routes radiate from the seaports along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Three notable caravans meet annually at a religious fair at Mecca. The Persians gathering at Bagdad, the Arabs of the Sahara, at Cairo, and the Arabians, at Damascus, come together at Mecca to sell and buy and to visit the tomb of Mahomet.

See Aden; Mecca; Camel; Timbuctoo; Cairo