Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  Such emergency situations also provide the elephants with improved odds of escape. But the elephants do not always seize the opportunity. Perhaps this hesitancy is force of habit, or perhaps the elephants sometimes feel a genuine sense of responsibility and loyalty to the humans in plight. An elephant who went over into the wild would more likely be a female, like Maggie, than a male. While a male work elephant at an emergency work site can mate with wild females in the forest and return unburdened each morning to his labors, a pregnant female ought to avoid strenuous work. Better to be pregnant in the forest. Elephant experts in the Burmese logging industry, as well as tribal mahouts in the Trans-Patkai area, agree that female work elephants are likelier to join wild herds than males are.70

  Thus, at any given time, a nonnegligible number of wild-born elephants have mothers who knew domesticity with humans. At a collective level, elephants have experiences of both wilderness and domesticity that circulate among the broader elephant population through this process of capture and escape. With such patterns and dynamics in mind, we might begin to think of the elephants’ emergency evacuation skills as a kind of subtly coevolved trait—developed both through elephants’ interactions among each other and through their cooperation with humans in distress.

  Map D. Present and ancient ranges of the African elephant

  (Loxodonta africana). Cartography by Jacob Shell.

  Chapter 4

  A COUNTERPOINT IN AFRICA

  IMAGES OF ELEPHANTS PERMEATE GLOBAL POPULAR and consumer culture in the twenty-first century, turning up not just in nature documentaries but also in advertising, company logos, children’s books, cartoons, and all manner of decorated consumer goods. Almost always this popular, globally commercialized image is of an African elephant, not an Asian one.

  There are an array of aesthetic explanations for this tendency. The African elephant is taller—or at least the savanna subspecies is; the African forest elephant of the Congo is relatively small.1 The concave slope of the African elephant’s back and the slightly more upright angle at which it carries its head lend the species a kind of grandeur and stateliness that some may find lacking in the Asian species. The African elephant’s ears are huge and splendid while the Asian elephant’s are rather small. Many graphic designers surely appreciate how the African elephant’s forehead rises seamlessly from the line of its trunk. The Asian elephant’s forehead, by contrast, juts upward into a bumpy, domelike protrusion. Both species, of course, are beautiful and majestic in their own right, and certainly many artists have found ways of conveying the magnificence of the Asian elephant. But visually comparing the two animals side by side, it’s not difficult to discern why many modern illustrators, designers, and iconographers have been drawn to the African species.

  African elephants exist almost entirely in the wild, whereas a quarter to a third of Asian elephants are working animals, most with mahouts. Thus while Polo Ralph Lauren’s logo shows a horse with a rider, Banana Republic’s shows an African elephant, who like virtually all African elephants is riderless. The mahout would be a better-known figure to the world if Asia’s long-standing cultures of elephant domestication and mahoutship were mirrored in Africa. Why aren’t they?

  Understanding the divergence in the two species’ experiences with humans requires a look at human attempts at domesticating both African and Asian elephants over the past several thousand years. This story takes us far beyond Southeast Asia and India, to the Mediterranean world in classical times, including much of North Africa, Southwest Asia, and southern Europe. In turn, by looking at how efforts at domesticating African elephants succeeded briefly in this Mediterranean and African zone but did not endure, we can throw into sharper relief the complex and unique dynamic that emerged between humans and elephants in South and Southeast Asia, and that continues to shape the Asian species to this day.

  THERE ARE ROUGHLY ten times as many African elephants on the planet today as there are Asian elephants.2 But unlike in Asia, elephant domestication in Africa has never been widespread. Furthermore, while the history of elephant domestication in Asia has been continuous over the past three millennia, in Africa the practice has occurred only in fits and starts. It is possible to misconstrue the contrast as evidence that Asia’s long-standing tradition of capturing wild elephants has caused that continent’s elephant population collapse. But comparing the histories of Asian versus African elephants over the past several millennia reveals a more complicated picture.

  The earliest evidence of elephant domestication appears in the archaeological record of the ancient Indus Valley, or Harappan, civilization, whose excavated legacy has left us several stone seals showing an elephant with a cloth, or pannier, draped across its back. The imagery strongly indicates that the Indus Valley civilization was familiar with taming elephants.3 Scholars disagree about whether to date elephant domestication in the Indus Valley to the second millennium B.C. or even earlier, a debate that won’t be settled here. A more pertinent question, perhaps—though the archaeological record gives us no means to answer it—is just who invented elephant domestication. Did the inhabitants of the Indus Valley civilization invent it themselves, or did they learn it from a nearby culture that was perhaps more adept at befriending forest animals than at stone-carving?

  Whatever the case, by the first millennium B.C., elephant domestication was widespread throughout the Indian subcontinent. Powerful kings and princes demanded elephants as beasts of combat for their armies. Elephants were also employed for nonviolent tasks, like logging, transport, marching in parades, and so on. But the use of elephants for military combat appears to have been especially important during this epoch. A kind of war elephant “arms race” among ancient Indian kings motivated many to institute royal forest preserves, where agricultural development was banned, so that a steady supply of elephants could be caught for the military. Some have proposed that these royal preserves even helped to conserve the species’ numbers.4 The idea is intriguing but somewhat unlikely: even when ancient kings fastidiously protected elephant forests, their ultimate aim was to capture elephants at a massive scale and march them toward death: either immediate death in bloody battle, or genetic death in the military’s elephant corrals, where they were unlikely to mate. The forest-based economic activities in which the elephants were engaged—that is, in logging or in cross-forest transportation—would have placed domesticated elephants in a far better position to reproduce.

  An African tradition of elephant domestication shows up in ancient records too. At Meroe, along the Nile River in present-day Sudan, a civilization that historians refer to as the Meroites (or sometimes the Kushites) appears to have had an elephant-domesticating culture as early as 400 B.C. A stone relief excavated from the Meroite temple site Musawwarat-es-Sofra shows a king riding an elephant, with an attendant kneeling for them and holding the elephant’s trunk. The excavations here indicate that the complex had a large enclosure, possibly a corral for the domestic elephants.5

  Little is known about the Meroites; and nothing about how their tradition of domesticating elephants came about. Meroe was a major metalworking center in the ancient North African world—one archaeologist has whimsically dubbed it the “Birmingham of Africa,” after the metalworking city of the English Industrial Revolution.6 As a center for metal crafts, Meroe had significant trade networks extending in all directions, including eastward to Yemen and the Arabian Sea. Since Indian trade also extended to Yemen, it’s plausible that the Meroites learned of elephant domestication through contact with Indian merchants. Of course, Indians had been domesticating a different species—the Elephas genus, of which the Asian elephant is the only surviving member, split from the African elephant’s Loxodonta genus millions of years ago—but there’s no reason this modern, Linnaean sort of distinction would have prevented the Meroites from trying to do in their own backyard what their tradesmen informed them the Indians were doing in theirs.7 That said, it’s equally plausible that the Meroites innovated their
own local domestication methods, independently of their trade contacts.

  The Meroites’ use of elephants seems to have been an isolated phenomenon in Africa for another century. Of course, we can’t discount the possibility that a culture in southern Africa domesticated elephants during this period but never left a stone record of it. Training the sub-Saharan African elephant as a work animal would have been especially practical and useful. Other large herbivorous mammals in southern Africa (giraffes, zebras, gazelles, and so forth) are far more difficult to domesticate than African elephants. Nor could horses or cattle easily have been brought from northern to southern Africa. A biting insect called the tsetse fly is widespread in tropical southern Africa and carries a parasite called the nagana pest, which is especially toxic for most work animal species originating from Eurasia—but not to African elephants. In the historical record, though, it’s only at Meroe in Sudan, and not in southern Africa, that we find hard evidence of elephant domestication in Africa during this time.

  This isolation had changed dramatically by the third century B.C. What changed during the intervening years was the incredible influence, throughout the Mediterranean world (which included North Africa), of the Hellenic Macedonian king Alexander (popularly known as Alexander the Great), who conquered lands from the Balkan Peninsula to the Indus River Valley between 336 and 323 B.C. Alexander’s experience at the easternmost reach of his empire proved decisive in launching Europe and North Africa’s own brief but often spectacular “war elephant” era. In 326 B.C., on the upper reaches of the Indus, Alexander was impressed by the elephant cavalry of the enemy Indian king Porus (or Puru). Alexander had seen trained elephants before, in Persia, but they had been mostly transport elephants carrying supplies or hauling wagons along roads.8 But Porus’s terrifying elephant cavalry made an indelible impression on the Greek soldiers at the battle of the Hydaspes, in modern-day Punjab. This in turn shaped Alexander’s subsequent military thinking, as well as that of his generals, especially his lead general Seleucus, whose infantry had borne the main brunt of the Indian elephants’ attack.9

  The tactical strength of Porus’s war elephants lay partly in their ability to carry several soldiers at once, who could fire arrows in multiple directions. More importantly, though, the elephants were incredibly effective as a first line of attack, sweeping aside the Hellenes’ defenses with their great tusks and powerful trunks, then stomping and kicking stunned infantrymen, while even the best-trained horses scattered in fright. Alexander’s forces ultimately prevailed in the battle, but his and Seleucus’s immediate thought was to gain elephants of their own as tribute, along with these elephants’ Indian mahouts, who could teach the Hellenic soldiers the art of mahoutship.10 The Alexandrian forces would send the elephants and mahouts westward, as a new weapon of war to wreak havoc upon enemy armies around the Mediterranean.

  Alexander died only a few years after this battle, but many of the post-Alexandrian Hellenic successor states, inspired by Alexander’s experience, built up armies with large elephant cavalries. The general Seleucus gained control of the largest of these successor states, the Seleucid Empire, in which elephants played a crucial role as pack animals, both in military and civilian life.11 The Seleucids, as the rulers of this empire came to be called, had an ecological advantage over the other post-Alexandrian successor states in acquiring elephants, because during this time the natural habitat of the Asian elephant still extended across Persia into Mesopotamia—both fully within the Seleucid domain.12

  Nonetheless, the Hellenic states cut off from a natural supply of Asian elephants could still trade for them or seize them (and their attendants) as war booty. Thus the Greek king Pyrrhus, who ruled the small Hellenic kingdom of Epirus, was able to build up a significant cavalry of Asian combat elephants, even though Epirus was located in northwestern Greece on the Ionian Sea, far from the Asian elephant’s natural range. Vying for control of the central Mediterranean, Pyrrhus and his generals used their elephants to great effect, marching on southern Italy in 280 B.C. and wresting the island of Sicily from the Carthaginian Empire in 277 B.C.13

  After their defeat, Carthaginian leaders built elephant cavalries of their own. They had some elephants shipped from the east, but the city also had its own local supply of elephants: African pachyderms in the foothills of the nearby Atlas Mountains, in modern-day Tunisia and Algeria, whose river valleys in classical times were wetter and greener than they are today. These elephants of North Africa looked somewhat different from the large savanna elephants to the south, though they were of the same species. The North African elephants were smaller—a bit smaller, even, than many Asian elephants. But they were still physically imposing and seemed promising as combat animals.

  The Carthaginians hired the Numidians, a tribal group from the Atlases, to catch and tame the local elephants. Carthage’s elephant cavalry became a mixture of Asian and African elephants.14 The elephant tamers and mahouts were also a mixed lot, composed of both Indians and Numidians. Despite the tamers’ mixed origins, though, Carthaginians referred to mahouts as “Indians”—a word that, in the context of elephant culture in the classical Mediterranean world, came to refer to a profession (mahoutship) rather than to a people from the landmass of India.15

  Some Mediterranean geographers at this time conflated India and Africa, imagining them as connected at their extremities by a land bridge out beyond the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean was surely an inland sea, these geographers supposed—otherwise how could India and Africa both have elephants? Other classical geographers, who lent more credence to the tales of sailors, disputed the theory. But the proposed Indo-African “land bridge” would show up on some European world maps as late as the medieval era, over a thousand years after Carthage first mixed Indian with African mahouts, which had contributed to the original misperception. Only in the fifteenth century, when Vasco da Gama reached India from the Atlantic, were Western geographers satisfied, once and for all, that the hypothetical land bridge did not exist.16

  Carthage was not the only North African power to train African elephants for war during the third century B.C. Egypt, which had become another Hellenic successor state, ruled by a royal line called the Ptolemies, clashed with the Seleucids over control of the Levant, the far eastern Mediterranean coast. Wishing to build an elephant cavalry of their own to compete with the sophisticated elephant divisions of the Seleucids, the Greek-speaking kings of Egypt established elephant-hunting ports along the so-called Troglodyte (or “cave-dweller”) coast, today’s Sudanese and Eritrean shore of the Red Sea. The largest of these hunting ports was Ptolemais Theron (Ptolemy of the Hunts).17

  This area was outside the Ptolemies’ sphere of direct influence, and handsome sums had to be paid to local elephant hunting tribes (referred to in records as “Troglodytes” and “Blemmyes”) to capture elephants alive rather than kill them for ivory and meat. The captured African elephants were taken by specially designed ships up the Red Sea coast and then by canal across the desert to Memphis on the Nile, the Ptolemies’ major city. (Eventually the canal route was deemed impractical, and the elephants were marched overland instead.)18 Here they were trained for warfare. The Ptolemies’ elephant specialists seem to have been a mix of Indians and Meroites. Possibly some of the Troglodyte elephant catchers came into Egypt as well, to become war mahouts. The Ptolemaic elephants’ most famous deployment was at the Battle of Raphia in 217 B.C., at the modern site of the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian Ptolemies had 73 African elephants; the Persian Seleucids had 102 Asian elephants. This was, evidently, the only battle in history where African and Asian combat elephants were made to fight each other. Records of the battle assert that the Asian elephants, who were larger and better trained, thoroughly outperformed the African elephants. But much else was going on in the battle, and the Ptolemies won the day.19

  By this point in the third century B.C., Mediterranean military strategists were beginning to realize that Alexander and his successors may have overestimated the
effectiveness of elephants in combat, and that the subsequent arms race in elephants, which had mobilized thousands of elephants, both African and Asian, away from their natural habitats and toward the Mediterranean, had been irrational. Combat elephants were most effective against armies that had no prior experience with them. Porus had deployed his elephant cavalry against Alexander with notable success, just as Pyrrhus of Epirus and his elephants had taken the Romans and Carthaginians by surprise during his campaigns in southern Italy and Sicily.

  But Roman generals adjusted their field tactics in anticipation of further elephant-based frontline attacks. They realized that war elephants, though very fast when charging, lacked a horse cavalry’s ability to change direction quickly, to avoid oncoming spears and arrows. In the forests of India, this disadvantage might be offset by the paucity of large open spaces needed to fire a projectile at an elephant from a safe distance, but the Mediterranean was drier and more sparsely vegetated. The Roman generals divided their own defensive front lines into comblike formations so that charging elephants could be easily enveloped and speared from the side. The strategy proved effective.20

  The ancient Mediterranean world’s most famous episode involving war elephants was the ambitious campaign of the Carthaginian leader Hannibal Barca against Rome in 218 B.C. Hannibal’s army marched with thirty-seven war elephants from Spain through France, across the high, white-peaked European Alps (though it’s unclear through exactly which pass they crossed), and into the Italian Peninsula. The elephants seem to have been a mix of Asian and African. Hannibal’s personal elephant was named Surus, sometimes translated as “the Syrian,” so was likely an Asian elephant.21