ABSTRACT
CARAVAN trade and desert travel have been variously, and in some aspects lengthily, described. But there is one type of traveller, the desert courier of the dromedary post, who has hitherto been mentioned only incidentally. Four separate and distinctive postal services of the Syrian Desert now remain to be discussed. Since the ninth century A.D., the Abbasids, the Mamluks, the Ottoman Turks and the English have successively made use of a dromedary post, to bridge this desert which intervenes between Syria and Mesopotamia. In a later phase, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British dromedary post became a link in an imperial, Anglo-Indian service; and the Near Eastern transdesert postal system was only the intermediate section of an organization that united the Occident with the Orient. In this period it was best known, at least to Europeans; but the desert postal services were no less interesting or important in their earlier phases.
