World Elephant Day 2024: Hannibal Barca and Emperor Akbar used pachyderms brilliantly, though in very different historical situations, says Thomas Trautmann

It is yet another World Elephant Day. As the world and India celebrate these mighty animals, it is important to remember that they have been important for human societies long before mechanisation happened.

While the Asian or Indian elephant has been domesticated and used by humans since millennia, Africa too has had its own dalliance with the elephant.  

Before Rome became a powerful empire under Augustus, it was a republic and was challenged for supremacy of the Mediterranean by the city-state of Carthage in North Africa, located where Tunis, the capital of Tunisia lies today.

Carthage had been founded by Phoenicians, who came from Phoenicia in the Holy Land on the other end of the sea. The tension between Rome and Carthage blew up and resulted in the Punic Wars, Punic derived from Punicus, meaning ‘Phoenician’.

There were three Punic Wars. The first went Rome’s way and the third as well. But in the second, Carthage was initially winning, as it was led by the brilliant general, Hannibal Barca.

Hannibal brought the war to the Italian Peninsula. He marched from Hispania (Spain) into southern Gaul (France). He then crossed the Alps into Italy. With Hannibal were men, horses—and elephants.

For years, historians have wondered how Hannibal took elephants to the Alps. And who were the elephants? Were they African or Asian?

Down To Earth decided to put the questions to Thomas Trautmann, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Michigan. Trautmann’s works have mostly focused on ancient India and his PhD thesis was about the Arthashastra, on which he is a leading authority. Trautmann is also the author of Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History, published in 2015.

Excerpts: 

Q. Who were the North African Elephants? Do we have a record of their evolutionary history?

A: When Alexander of Macedon died unexpectedly at Babylon (323 BCE) at the age of 32, his officers divided the 200 elephants he had brought back from India among themselves and went to war with one another over the territories he had conquered. The war of the Successors created a tremendous scramble for more war elephants. Seleucus secured the eastern regions of the former Persian Empire, touching India; made war with Chandragupta Maurya, and the two made a peace by which Seleucus got 500 elephants and ceded most of what is now Afghanistan to Chandragupta. Seleucus used the elephants to secure his domination of Babylon, and his successors continued to get elephants from India. Another officer, Ptolemy, held Egypt, and he could not get elephants from India because Seleucus blocked the way. And so, the Ptolemies captured elephants in North Africa and trained them for war. They certainly used Indian elephant hunters, mahouts and trainers, and Indian knowledge of elephants, in doing so. In Greek, the word Indos (Indian) acquired the specialised meaning of ‘elephant driver’ under the Ptolemies. The Ptolemaic capture of wild elephants of North Africa, turning them into war elephants with Indian personnel and techniques, was emulated by other North Africans, notably the Numidians, Mauretanians and Carthaginians.

The point to grasp is that Greek sources agree that the Indian elephant was larger than the African elephant, and inferior to it in warfare between Seleucids and Ptolemies, or other elephant-using powers. Thus, whatever was the species of the North African elephant, it was not the savanna elephant of Africa, Loxodonta africana, the males of which are larger than those of the Asian elephant.

Q. There were elephants in North Africa, north of Sahel, once. It does show that the Sahara was green enough to host elephant populations at one time. Your comments?

 A: Yes, very likely. One view has been that northernmost populations of the smaller forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) were slowly forced to move further north by the expansion of the desert. But other scenarios are possible, and we must depend upon paleontologists to figure out the identity of the North African elephant.

 Q. What role did the North African Elephant play in the social life of Carthage? How did the Carthaginians, descendants of the sea-faring Phoenicians, learn to train elephants?

 A: I do not know about elephants in Carthaginian social life. But here is something striking to consider about their use by Hannibal, namely that he used his elephants to attack the camp of the Roman general Fulvius just before dawn, when the Romans were asleep. In the tumult, some of Hannibal’s “Indians” were to shout in Latin that Fulvius had ordered everyone to abandon camp and make for a nearby hill. It was an ambush, and had it worked, the Romans would have been killed or captured. Elephants were used in India to attack enemy camps. In the Arthashastra (2.2.13-14) we read:

Victory for a king depends principally upon elephants.

Elephants, having extremely large bodies and life-destroying actions,

pound the soldiers, battle arrays, forts and camps of the enemy.

Q. The North African Elephant was trained by humans as a war machine. Today’s Asian elephants are also domesticated. But why not the African bush and forest species?

A: During the colonial period, several attempts were made to capture and train African elephants, notably in the Belgian Congo in the time of King Leopold, with some success.

Q. How would you compare Hannibal’s use of the North African Elephant in war against Emperor Akbar’s usage of them in South Asia several centuries later?

A: The two used elephants brilliantly, but the historical situations in which they acted were very different. Hannibal’s feat of getting 37 elephants across the Alps was astonishing, and after doing so he harassed the Romans for 16 years while cut off from reinforcements. He played a weak hand audaciously and with great inventiveness. Akbar positively loved his stable of royal elephants and was fearless when driving a favorite elephant himself, in the manner of an Indian king or the god Indra, as we see in sculptures of the early historic period. But cannon and muskets were already in use, with heavy cavalry at the heart of the action, and elephants were beginning to lose their effectiveness at the centre of the battlefield. The new conditions would soon push elephants to the edge, into such roles as hauling field artillery, and they lost the ability to break up infantry formations as the age of gunpowder warfare advanced.

Q. Today, there is talk of bringing back the Barbary Lion to North Africa. There is also talk of and work being done on bringing mammoth, aurochs, quagga, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger back by implanting their DNA in their nearest extant relatives. Can the same be done for the North African Elephant? Or should we rather concentrate on conserving the bush and forest species in Africa?

A: The situation of living elephants is so very dire that we must make use of every means we have to preserve them alive. Preserving living species from extinction has to be the priority, over reviving species gone extinct.