"Bactrian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The Bactrian have two humps; the Arabian one only. They are swift in battle and most useful to carry burdens. This animal is extremely observant of rule and measure, for it will not move if it has a greater weight than it is used to, and if ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Hshimi[FN562] cubits in length; and it hath feet like those of an elephant, but it flieth only twice a year.' And there was with King Shimakh an officer, by name Timshun, who used every day to carry off two Bactrian[FN563] camels from the land of Irak and cut them up for the bird that it might eat them. So King Shimakh bade the fowl take up Janshah and bear him to the cell of the hermit Yaghmus; and it rose into the air and flew on days and nights, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... Macedonians after the engagement, and Aristobulus copied it into his journal. We thus possess, through Arrian, unusually authentic information as to the composition and arrangement of the Persian army. On the extreme left were the Bactrian, Daan, and Arachosian cavalry. Next to these Darius placed the troops from Persia proper, both horse and foot. Then came the Susians, and next to these the Cadusians. These forces ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... are found in inscriptions formerly known as Bactrian, Indo-Bactrian, and Aryan, and appearing in ancient Gandh[a]ra, now eastern Afghanistan and northern Punjab. The alphabet of the language is found in inscriptions dating from the fourth century B.C. to ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion of the ruminants.] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the convulsive struggles for freedom, the calamitous downfalls of empire, and the strange new regenerations which fill the pages of ancient and mediaeval history. Alike when the oriental myriads, Assyrian, Chaldean, Median, Persian, Bactrian, from the snows of Syria to the Gulf of Ormus, from the Halys to the Indus, poured like a deluge upon Greece and beat themselves to idle foam on the sea-girt rock of Salamis and the lowly plain of Marathon; when all the kingdoms of the earth went down with her ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the battle, and in the most dangerous crisis of the day proved himself truly great, always taking judicious measures, with a cheerful confidence of success. His left wing was terribly shaken by a tumultuous charge of the Bactrian cavalry, who broke into the ranks of the Macedonians, while Mazaeus sent some horsemen completely round the left wing, who fell upon the troops left to guard the baggage. Parmenio, finding his men thrown into confusion by these attacks, sent a message to Alexander, that his fortified ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... altars on their coins, the Kanerkis or the Scythians of India, the rulers of the Punjaub, seem to have adopted the religion of the Magi (Lassen, in J. B. A. S. ix. 456; Prinsep, Note on Historic Researches from Bactrian Coins, 106). As far as Southern India is concerned, the mention of Brahmani Magi in Ptolemy (150) seems to indicate some relation with Persia, but the Kanarese word mag or ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... bactrian's frame With anger was inflated, Till, growing larger, he became Egregiously elated; For inspiration's sudden spell Had pointed out a ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... and has no historic significance. More suggestive is the affinity of many of the columns which stand before these caves to Persian prototypes (see Fig. 21). It is not improbable that both Persian and classic forms were introduced into India through the Bactrian kingdom 250 years B.C. Otherwise we must seek for the origin of nearly all Buddhist forms in a pre-existing wooden architecture, now wholly perished, though its traditions may survive in the wooden screens in the fronts of the caves. While some of these ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... of a more robust and compact breed than the tall beabt used in India, and is more carefully tended. The two-humped Bactrian camel is commonly used in the Oxus regions, but is seldom seen near the Indian ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... or rather hovels, of mud and rubble to indicate the importance which from early times must have attached to Sarhad as the highest place of permanent occupation on the direct route leading from the Oxus to the Tarim Basin. Here was the last point where caravans coming from the Bactrian side with the products of the Far West and of India could provision themselves for crossing that high tract of wilderness 'called Pamier' of which old Marco Polo rightly tells us: 'You ride across ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... modern language the term dromedary is very improperly applied to the Bactrian, or two-hunched camel, a slow beast of burden. The word dromedary is formed from the Greek celer, and only belongs to a peculiar breed of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... mythology, which I imagine did not relate to the Pamphylian Magus, but to the head of all the Magi, who was reverenced and worshipped by them. There was another styled a Persian, whom Pythagoras is said to have [943]visited. Justin takes notice of the Bactrian [944]Zoroaster, whom he places in the time of Ninus. He is also mentioned by [945]Cephalion, who speaks of his birth, and the birth of Semiramis ([Greek: genesin Semirameos kai Zoroastrou Magou]) as of the same ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... distribute them by lot in equal shares for each division. [56] Finally he sent out another proclamation, saying that if there was any slave among the Syrians, Assyrians, or Arabians who was a Mede, a Persian, a Bactrian, a Carian, a Cilician, or a Hellene, or a member of any other nation, and who had been forcibly enrolled, he was to come forward and declare himself. [57] And when they heard the herald, many came forward gladly, and out of their number Cyrus selected the strongest ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... premise. But if we have not examined all ruminants, having omitted most giraffes, most deer, most oxen, etc., how do we know that the unexamined (say, some camels) are not exceptional? Camels are vicious enough to be carnivorous; and indeed it is said that Bactrian camels will eat flesh rather than starve, though of course their ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... of Florida I had a tame tarpon, which could swallow anything—croquet balls, door scrapers—and once ate an entire cottage pianoforte in half-an-hour. Here I may add that in my travels in Turkestan I was attacked by a boa-constrictor, and, though I escaped with my life, it proceeded to swallow the Bactrian camel on which I was riding. On the following day, however, when the boa was still in a comatose condition, I killed it with a boomerang, rescued the camel and continued ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... called that too. Dromedaries or Heiries are one and the same animal. Heiries are more slenderly built and far more fleet than ordinary Camels, whether they are one-humped and Arabian, or Bactrian, with two humps. To an Arab 'Fleet as the Heirie' means 'fleet as the wind.' We are the Camels of Oman, and can travel through the desert without stopping for several days and nights. Thus we reach the end of our journeys quickly, and our masters cry: 'It is well!' In days of old the Arabs said: ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... village may vanish, emigrating northward in summer, and southward in winter. Many a Kirghiz cavalcade was overtaken on the road, with long tent-ribs and felts tied upon the backs of two-humped camels, for the Bactrian dromedary has not been able to endure the severities of these Northern climates. The men would always be mounted on the camels' or horses' backs, while the women would be perched on the oxen and bullocks, trained for the saddle and as beasts of burden. The men never walk; if ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... is properly to be conceived as reaching from the Persian Gulf to the mountain chains which flank and feed the Indus; and is the true vital power of the East in the days of Marathon: but it has no influence on Christian history except through Arabia; while, of the northern Asiatic tribes, Mede, Bactrian, Parthian, and Scythian, changing into Turk and Tartar, we need take no heed until they invade us in our ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin |
