[Saddle-Mounted Cannon]

Designed for a cavalry of camels, the saddle known as the zamburak (Persian for "little wasp") was used across Central and Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to convey cannons across difficult terrain, albeit at the camels’ expense. In battle, the animals would be restrained on their knees as bombardiers loaded and fired the weapons from atop their backs. Regarded with curiosity in Europe, zamburaks were sometimes exhibited there as exotic novelties of the non-Western world. Such may be the context for this French photograph, which isolates the saddle in the studio as if it were an abstract sculpture or scientific specimen.