Caravan
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Caravan. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
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
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a Persian word used to rge companies which traveled todenote large c gether in Asia and Africa for the sake of security from robbers, having in view, principally, trade or pilgrimages. In Mohammedan countries caravans of pilgrims are annually formed to make the journey to Mecca. The most important are those which annually set out from Damascus and Cairo. Camels are used as a means of conveyance on account of their remarkable powers of endurance.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's said in 1910 that caravans were "still the chief means of collecting and distributing goods" across North Africa and much of Asia, and Collier's in 1921 still described pilgrim trains setting out from Damascus and Cairo for Mecca. Motor trucks, then railways and aircraft, ended that: the Damascus pilgrim caravan effectively ceased after the First World War, and today nearly all of the roughly two million annual hajj pilgrims arrive by air, bus and car. Camel caravans survive as a working trade in only a few places, chiefly the Saharan salt runs to Taoudenni in Mali and Bilma in Niger, and even those now compete with lorries. One detail in Aiton's was wrong when written: Muhammad's tomb is at Medina, not Mecca.
Written for this edition, 2026.