Research: Hybrid Camels Existed in Ancient Iraq

The Temple of Allat is a well-preserved 2,000-year-old monument located at the site of the ancient market city of Hatra in northern Iraq. Allat was a pre-Islamic Arabian goddess who was widely worshipped in the Middle East during the early centuries of the first millennium. In the second century AD, on a lintel above one of the temple’s inner entrances, an ancient sculptor created an image of a king’s head surrounded by two lines of five camels on each side. Previous examinations of the carvings had identified the camels as a mixture of dromedaries and Bactrian camels, which were the two types of camels that traders and agricultural laborers were using in Hatra at that time. Dromedaries were a local type of camel, while Bactrians were a Central Asian variety that would have been imported into the region from the east.