Page 235 - The Postal Agencies in Eastern Arabia

1 or long enough, the first record of the camel as a domestic animal
U .)ccn Pl:,ccd around 1,000 B.C. when the tribes of the Arabian
peninsula over-rail the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. But here in Abu Dhabi
was lound evidence, in the form of a relief carving of a camel on one of
the stones o! a burial chamber, of the camel having been domesticated in
Oman 1,300 years earlier.

Like Dilmun, however, the land of Makan drifted into obscurity
some time in the first millcnium B.C. and remained lost for 2,000 years.
A change in the climate may have been partly to blame for diminishing
fortune: the rainfall, which had been adequate to provide crops for a
settled community, lessened and the land became arid and harsh. A
nomadic existence was forced upon the inhabitants, their settled villages
were smothered with wind-blown sand and perhaps only the camel
provides a thread of continuity through these lost centuries.

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232