
“The Camel Through the Ages” exhibition has kicked off at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) showcasing camel’s special place in the heart of Saudis, reported Ithra.
In collaboration with the Riyadh-based Layan Cultural Foundation (LCF), the event will run until Nov. 1 featuring a year designated by the Ministry of Culture as the Year of the Camel.
Camels were a primary means of transportation across vast distances offering a good company to combat the isolation of long journeys. This long companionship has inspired poets and writers to document the camel’s unwavering loyalty to humans through tales, poems and proverbs. Today the camels remain one of the basic elements of Saudi Arabia’s history and civilization.

At the end of 2023, the Saudi Cabinet officially named the year 2024 ‘the Year of the Camel’, celebrating the unique cultural value of camels in the Arabian Peninsula from the dawn of history up to the present day.
“Camels have long occupied a special place in the societies of the Arabian Peninsula, including the kingdom of Saudi Arabia; they were a means of transportation across vast distances, crossing mountains, valleys, and deserts, similar to ship movements within the sea waves,” Ithra said in a statement.

The LCF stated that the current exhibition was inspired by a two-volume Arabic-language book about camels, launched by LCF in cooperation with the King Abdulaziz Public Library. That is why the event is exhibiting various works taken from the books while other works were made specifically for the exhibition.
The event boasts five themes, as follows:
- The camel as an iconic symbol of the Arabian identity
- The camel as a meditative or spiritual connection, especially through Qur’anic verses
- The camel as a source of pride in camel races and as part of the family
- Camels as part of oral or folk history
- Camels as a companion, in times of rest and travel

“We came up with five themes in order to create a journey in which the visitor could flow freely between the artworks, it is not a linear journey,” Kumail Muhammed Almusaly, one of the exhibition’s curators, said.
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