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C is for Camel

Bactrian camel photo courtesy zsl.org.

There is an old British joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Attributable to Sir Alec Issigonis (who originated the Mini auto), the last laugh might be on Sir Alec if he tried to cross the Asian deserts with only horses. While horses did originate and thrive in the grasslands of Asia, the camels always ruled the dunes, whether the sand was in the Sahara, the Gobi, or even the deserts of Australia. A Mini wouldn’t last very long trying to cross the Silk Road. Camels–in particular the Bactrian camels–were the ships that sailed across the Asian deserts.

The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary, two;
Or else the other way around.
I’m never sure. Are you?

Ogden Nash

The mnemonic to separate the two types of domesticated camels, the Bactrian from the Dromedary, is pretty simple. “B” has two humps, whereas “D” has one. The problem is remembering the mnemonic. Maybe after this post, we’ll all just remember the difference.

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B is for Bombyx Mori

12th c. image of silk production, from James Hare website.

Here we go round the Mulberry Bush, the Mulberry Bush, the Mulberry Bush
Here we go round the Mulberry Bush
All on a Frosty Morning…

Were they experimenting, those first enterprising Chinese textile workers who pulled the threads off a caterpillar’s cocoon and found them to be strong and fine? Did they know to dip them in water to separate them from the egg or was that an accident, like most inventions? There may be up to a mile in threads in a single cocoon, so say the advertisements, and placing the unopened cocoon in water frees them.

The Chinese discovered as far back as the Neolithic Age (the New Stone Age) that the wispy strings of the cocoon could be spun into a cloth delicate, shiny, and strong. They held the secret close for centuries, until someone smuggled the cocoons and the mulberry out, to try it on their own.

Not everyone succeeded. Historian/humorist Bill Bryson thinks that the mulberry bush song we may have sung as kids reflectsthe frustrations of the 18th and 19th century British, who tried to replicate the Chinese silk production but found their climate too inhospitable on those frosty mornings.

The cocoons like it warm.

Worm/caterpillar Bombyx Mori with its cocoon.
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A is for Asia

There are few descriptive phrases that sum up a time and place as elegantly as “The Silk Road.” It is an idea specific to geography and historical era. Others terms–World War I, Manifest Destiny, the Roman Empire, or the Enlightenment–belong to a specific country or encompass a comparatively brief span of years. Even the Renaissance, as I found out in last year’s A to Z challenge, made a heavy impression mostly on a handful of places and was fairly localized to Italy and the coastal cities of Western Europe. Or take a place like the Fertile Crescent, which may have lasted centuries in the development of human processes, but it was really a spot, that convergence of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

In comparison, the Silk Road spread across a continent, and the biggest one at that. It began a few hundred years before the Common Era (BCE is the new way of saying minus zero year) and lasted into the era of colonization. To cover 26 posts on anything requires a vast stretch of subject.

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