The question of the origin of camel domestication traditionally begins, as does everything else, with the book of Genesis. Among the bribes received by Abraham from the Pharaoh of Egypt in prospect of taking Sarah into his harem were sheep, oxen, asses, and camels. Again in a later episode ten camels were sent along by Abraham with his eldest servant who was to seek out a wife for Isaac. His choice fell upon Rebekah as the first maiden to come to the well where the servant had stopped and offer drink not only to the servant but to the camels as well. Since a camel can drink as much as twenty-eight gallons of water in a single watering, the hospitality involved in watering a stranger’s string of ten animals may have been a truly extraordinary token of potential wifely submission. One generation further on camels appear again when Rachel, Jacob’s wife, hides among the camel furnishings the images stolen from her father and then sits upon them; and in the next generation Joseph is sold by his jealous brothers to Ishmaelite merchants from Gilead passing by with camels with spice and incense.

From these references a pattern of camel use can be extrapolated that seems very much in consonance with later Middle Eastern society: the camel forming part of a bridge price, a small caravan of camels crossing the desert from Palestine to Iraq, a woman perched atop a camel loaded with camp goods, merchants carrying incense to Egypt. This entire vision, however, both original text and extrapolated image, has been categorically rejected by W. F. Albright, one of the foremost scholars of Biblical history and Palestinian archaeology and the person whose opinion on camel domestication is most frequently encountered. According to Albright, any mention of camels in the period of Abraham is a blatant anachronism, the product of later priestly tampering with the earlier texts in order to bring them more in line with altered social conditions. The Semites of the time of Abraham, he maintains, herded sheep, goats, and donkeys but not camels, for the latter had not yet been domesticated and did not really enter the orbit of Biblical history until about 1100-1000 B.C. with the coming of the Midianites, the camel riding foes of Gideon.

Albright’s firm and repeated advocacy of this date, which might be extended backwards several centuries to allow for early stages of domestication, has been taken up by many other scholars; but it has not gone without contention. Although some students of camel domestication have ignored or been unaware of Albright’s viewpoint, it has strongly colored most analyses of the problem; and what appears to be a debate about the date of first domestication concentrates more often than not upon whether Abraham’s camels were real or interpolated. Consequently, any real or imagined depiction of a domestic camel antedating 1100 B.C. has been seized upon as conclusive proof by Albright’s challengers or written off as spurious or misdated by his supporters, all without taking into consideration the actual process of domestication or its social ramifications.

There are no sound grounds for doubting Albright’s contention that camel domestication first became a factor of importance in the Syrian and north Arabian deserts around the eleventh century B.C., and, as will be seen, there is much to support the contention besides the absence of camelline remains in the Holy Land archaeological sites of earlier date, which was Albright’s primary datum. On the other hand, this date need not be taken as the beginning date of camel domestication in an absolute sense. Closer attention to the process of domestication indicates that the camel was actually domesticated long before the year 1100 B.C., but in southern rather than northern Arabia were the practice did not indeed penetrate, although evidence of it may have until the period put forward by Albright.