'EITHER THE CAMEL, OR THE CAMEL DRIVER'

In Egypt at the time of the late dynasties, but before the Ptolemies, there was a severe shortage of sand as most of that valuable commodity had been used for the temples and the pyramids. Egyptian merchants tried to capitalise on the situation. They exported large quantities of cotton in an attempt to sell it to the proto-Russian tribes, who for their part, suffered shortages of the cotton they needed to make trendy clothes out of. The Egyptians, riding on camels loaded with "white gold," crossed the Bosporus, and reached the Strandzha mountain range, where they were met by Thracians. The latter were illiterate, but could use pretty flowery oral language.

The Thracians thought that the odd creatures laden with trunks full of cotton had been created by the Great Mother Goddess, their superior deity. The Thracian sages immediately organised a ritual sacrifice, and got themselves pretty jolly, mainly on roast lamb and undiluted wine (a fact which would later prompt the Greeks to name them barbarians, but this is another story altogether). The following day they found out that the camel drivers were as bizarre as their camels. They had a written language, even though it was rather complicated to decipher, and promised barter deals of plenty of cotton against just a few tonnes of sand.

As their pledges sounded too good to be true, a wise man, probably buried east of today's Topolovgrad, flew into a rage and shouted: "Hey, Egyptians! Either the camel, or the camel driver!" This sounded like a combat call to the Thracians, and only a total solar eclipse, that ancient astronomers had failed to predict, thwarted bloodshed.

Still, the phrase remained. "Either the camel, or the camel driver" means "I am ready to choose between two bad options." In modern Bulgarian, the idiom has also been modified into "Both the camel and the camel driver," but this is rare and is to be found only in northeastern Bulgaria, where no camels have ever been seen walking about.