An A through Z look at the punny names of animal groups with adorable illustrations for each!

Did you know elephants have parades, camels have caravans, and porcupines have prickles? From a shoal of aardvarks to a zeal of zebras, kids can learn the names of animal groups in this adorable padded board book. With bright, trendy illustrations and plenty of hidden puns, A Caravan of Camels showcases punny animal families of all kinds from A to Z. Whether it’s a smack, a barrel, or a zeal, it's a family!

Gary Paul Nabhan takes the reader on a vivid and far-ranging journey across time and space in this fascinating look at the relationship between the spice trade and culinary imperialism. Drawing on his own family’s history as spice traders, as well as travel narratives, historical accounts, and his expertise as an ethnobotanist, Nabhan describes the critical roles that Semitic peoples and desert floras had in setting the stage for globalized spice trade. Traveling along four prominent trade routes—the Silk Road, the Frankincense Trail, the Spice Route, and the Camino Real (for chiles and chocolate)—Nabhan follows the caravans of itinerant spice merchants from the frankincense-gathering grounds and ancient harbors of the Arabian Peninsula to the port of Zayton on the China Sea to Santa Fe in the southwest United States. His stories, recipes, and linguistic analyses of cultural diffusion routes reveal the extent to which aromatics such as cumin, cinnamon, saffron, and peppers became adopted worldwide as signature ingredients of diverse cuisines. Cumin, Camels, and Caravans demonstrates that two particular desert cultures often depicted in constant conflict—Arabs and Jews—have spent much of their history collaborating in the spice trade and suggests how a more virtuous multicultural globalized society may be achieved in the future.

Extremely social, camels will blow on each other’s faces as a friendly greeting. They also groan and roar! While most camels are domesticated and few wild camels survive on Earth today, these mammals thrive in a group, sometimes called a caravan. These groups are made up of a male leader, females, and young. Mothers care for their young and the caravan moves around together. Through this book’s photographs of camels, closely paired with easy-to-understand text, young readers will discover how these friendly animals grow and work together within their caravan.

Extremely social, camels will blow on each other’s faces as a friendly greeting. They also groan and roar! While most camels are domesticated and few wild camels survive on Earth today, these mammals thrive in a group, sometimes called a caravan. These groups are made up of a male leader, females, and young. Mothers care for their young and the caravan moves around together. Through this book’s photographs of camels, closely paired with easy-to-understand text, young readers will discover how these friendly animals grow and work together within their caravan.

Tired of carrying their burdens in the desert, the camels sneak away from the caravan and have exciting adventures as they explore other ways to travel.

John Hare has made three expeditions to the Mongolian and Chinese Gobi deserts, the first in 1993 with Russian scientists and the second and third with Chinese scientists in 1995 and 1996. The book records the amazing adventures he has experienced on those expeditions and will record details of the 30-day walk on foot in the formidable Kum Tagh sand dunes in the spring of 1997. He is the first recorded foreigner to have crossed the Gashun Gobi from north to south. The expeditions were primarily concerned with tracking down the mysterious wild Bactrian camel 'camelus bactrianus ferus' which lives in the heartland of the desert and is the ancestor of all domestic Bactrian stock. There are under a thousand left in the world and the wild Bactrian camel is more endangered than the giant Panda. This is John Hare's magnificent account of a formidable feat of modern exploration.

Camels are first mentioned in the Bible as the movable property of Abraham. During the early monarchy, they feature prominently as long-distance mounts for the Queen of Sheba, and almost a millennium later, the Gospels tell us about the impossibility of a camel passing through a needle’s eye. Given the limited extrabiblical evidence for camels before circa 1000 BCE, a thorough investigation of the spatio-temporal history of the camel in the ancient Near and Middle East is necessary to understand their early appearance in the Hebrew Bible. Camels in the Biblical World is a two-part study that charts the cultural trajectories of two domestic species—the two-humped or Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) and the one-humped or Arabian camel (Camelus dromedarius)—from the fourth through first millennium BCE and up to the first century CE. Drawing on archaeological camel remains, iconography, inscriptions, and other text sources, the first part reappraises the published data on the species’ domestication and early exploitation in their respective regions of origin. The second part takes a critical look at the various references to camels in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels, providing a detailed philological analysis of each text and referring to archaeological data and zoological observations whenever appropriate. A state-of-the-art evaluation of the cultural history of the camel and its role in the biblical world, this volume brings the humanities into dialogue with the natural sciences. The novel insights here serve scholars in disciplines as diverse as biblical studies, (zoo)archaeology, history, and philology.