Camel Ancestry and Domestication in Egypt and the Sahara by Michael Ripinsky
There are a great many magazines on archaeology telling of recent finds. However, most of them are too technical or too theological for many people. And frequently it may be difficult to see the value of a given discovery for Bible study.
In each issue of Archaeology and Biblical Research we will review recently published archaeology journals and magazines and give summaries of articles helpful to Bible students and teachers. Some of those to be surveyed can be found in another section of this issue.
Many excellent articles have been published since Bible and Spade suspended publication. We feel it will be helpful to our readers to review some of these before looking at more recent ones.
According to biblical chronology the Patriarchs lived at the end of the Early Bronze Age and the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age, ca. 2100–1800 BC.
Near Eastern scholars have long maintained that the camel was not domesticated until ca. 1100 BC. By this reckoning, the camel was not even domesticated at the time of Moses, traditional author of the first five books of the Bible (who lived about 1500 BC). So the mention of camels in the Patriarchal narratives has been one of the arguments critics have used to bolster their claim that the Bible is unreliable, and that it was written much later than the events it relates.
But the evidence gathered by Michael Ripinsky, summarized
A petroglyph found near A swan on the Nile depicts a camel and a man leading it by a rope, and includes a hierotic inscription assigned to the Sixth Dynasty (2423–2263 n.c.).
BSP 0 (Autumn 1987) p. 27
here, dispels the critics’ claims and demonstrates that the camel was domesticated, at least in Egypt, 1000 years before the time of Abraham!
“The story of the camel is, as much as anything, the story of the scholarship which pertains to its existence in early Egypt and the Sahara. It sometimes happens that a scholarly hypothesis hardens into accepted dogma, and such was the case to some extent regarding the camel.
“The eleventh-century BC date for the first domestication of the camel was proposed by William F. Albright on the strength of a cuneiform inscription — an Akkadian udru — on the Broken Obelisk of the Mesopotamlan ruler Tlglath-Plleser I (1115–1077 BC). This inscription relates to the breeding of Bactrian camels and was correlated by Albright and his followers with the first appearance of the domesticated camel in the Near East. Subscribers to this theory declined to accept the possibility of an earlier date for the domesticated animal on the grounds that such an important animal would have found its way into earlier records had it been present then.
“Some of Albright’s followers, especially those with a strong philological orientation, were inclined to overlook evidence from the archaeological record — available as early as the beginning of the century — documenting the existence of camels in Egypt. Indeed, some of these proponents have gone so far as to conclude that the geographical distribution of the camel did not even encompass the Mesop0tamlan Plain at the time of the inscription.
“Shortly before 1900, the archaeological team excavating Hiera-konpolis in Egypt brought to light what was probably the first known terracotta figurine of a dromedary. Subsequently, other sites from more distant localities in Arabia and Russia, but from the same time span, yielded parallel discoveries. Sir Wallis Budge, then Keeper of the British Museum, argued that the camel was known in predynastic Egypt on the basis of camel pottery figures discovered at Naqada. The presence of camels in Lower Egypt by the time of the First Dynasty. (3100–2890 BC) is definitely attested to by the findings of several archaeological digs ….
“The discovery of camel effigies from the time of the First Dynasty could have proven of much greater value in the reconstruction of socioeconomic life in ancient Egypt had the fact of their discovery been given more notice; but on the strength of the view on camels propounded earlier by Albright they remained in prolonged obscurity.
“It is rather unfortunate that this group of scholars remained oblivious to, or perhaps neglected to notice, the records of earlier archaeological excavations going back as far as the turn of the century and documenting existence of camels in early Egypt.”
There is much more data presented in this article than we have covered here. We highly recommend reading the complete article.
[ Illustration and article reprinted by permission of Archaeology, Vol. 35:3, Copyright Archaeological Institute of America, May/June, 1983, pp. 26-27.]
BSP 0 (Autumn 1987) p. 28