The march looms large in Western memory, the stuff of epic narrative and stirring paintings—and yet one senses in accounts of the failed campaign the limits of the Carthaginian military commanders’ elephant knowledge. For instance, when passing through France (Gaul, as it was known then), Hannibal’s elephants were unable to ford the Rhone River—a far gentler stream than the Sissiri during monsoon season. The soldiers had to build a small fleet of rafts to ferry them across. Why couldn’t the elephants do it themselves? Likely because these elephants had spent most or all of their lives in arid parts of the Iberian Peninsula or North Africa and so had little experience swimming.22
Nor would the Carthaginian commanders have known that elephants, if raised and trained near a proper river, could develop incredible swimming and fording abilities—more useful, even, than their abilities during combat. The value of elephants for logistics, rather than for combat, does not appear to have dawned on any of the North African or European military strategists of this era—an oversight that surely stemmed from Alexander having ignored the transport elephants he encountered in Persia a century earlier.23
From the second century B.C. onward, the use of war elephants in the Mediterranean world declined, all but disappearing by the first century A.D. Part of the explanation for the decline appears to be geopolitical: the triumph of the Romans, ruling from their European seat of power, and the defeat of the other ambitious Mediterranean powers to the south and east, closer to the natural ranges of African and Asian elephants. The Romans did employ war elephants in a variety of military campaigns throughout the European continent, from Greece and Macedonia to Iberia and Gaul. But they never invested as heavily in the development of large-scale elephant cavalries as had Carthage and most of the Greek-speaking powers—rivals whom the Romans ultimately vanquished.24
An even more important reason for the decline of the Mediterranean combat elephant was that the natural ranges of both Asian and African elephants rapidly contracted during this period. In the late classical era, Asian elephants retreated eastward, and the African ones moved south. The animals disappeared not just from Southwest Asia and the North African coast, but also from places as far south as Meroe. Wild elephants adjacent to the Mediterranean sphere may have been overcaptured and overhunted by humans, but the more decisive factor in this spatial retreat was that North Africa and the Middle East both became hotter and drier over the course of the late classical period, as the Saharan and Arabian deserts encroached upon what had formerly been verdant grassland.25
The domesticated African elephant fades from historical view until modern times—or nearly so. In the region along the Red Sea coast where the Ptolemies had established their elephant ports, a kingdom arose during the first millennium called Axum, located in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea. Numerous records attest to the Axumites’ use of domesticated elephants hundreds of years after the last elephant cavalry had been vanquished in the Mediterranean region, and the last Ptolemy was deposed from power in Egypt. In A.D. 533 the Byzantine emperor Justinian sent an envoy to Axum; the Axumite king greeted him on a chariot drawn by four elephants. Later in the century, Islamic accounts (which may be apocryphal) say that an Axumite king sent an army with an elephant cavalry to sack Mecca, but the elephants refused to approach the city.26
During this period, an Ethiopian hill tribe on the margins of Axum, the Beja people, are reported to have used a large number of trained elephants in a battle against Arab invaders.27 A British colonial administrator in Sudan opined in the 1950s that these Bejas were the descendants of the Blemmyes, or Troglodytes, who had caught wild African elephants for the Ptolemies of Egypt eight centuries previously.28 The Axum ruling class spoke and wrote Greek for many centuries, so it seems plausible that the Axumite elephant-domestication culture came directly from Ptolemaic Egypt. Alternatively, perhaps the Meroite elephant catchers and tamers migrated into the Axumite region, following the elephants in their retreat from an expanding Sahara. Or perhaps the Bejas and Axumites developed an elephant-domesticating tradition independently of Meroite Sudan and the Hellenic world. In any event, as late as the sixth century, a culture of elephant domestication appears to have persisted in the region of Axum.29 It disappeared with subsequent Arab conquests. The Arabs, unlike the Axumites, were camel domesticators, which gave them an enormous advantage as the Sahara gradually expanded.30
Domesticated elephants retreated from the Western experience for over a millennium. As the centuries passed, dim Western memories of trained elephants manned by mahouts tended to be negative, a symbol or storytelling trope signaling outside military incursion against the sphere of the Abrahamic religions. This is likely why the story of Hannibal’s elephant-mounted march against Rome, the eventual focal city of much of Christianity, looms large in Western memory; and why the biblical story of the Maccabee rebels’ resistance against the Seleucids’ war elephants looms large in the Jewish narrative tradition; and why Muslims refer to the failed Axumite campaign against Mecca as the Year of the Elephant. The trope shows up in modern storytelling too, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Battle of Pelennor Fields and in George Lucas’s Battle of Hoth.
This negative narrative legacy contrasts with the impressions formed by British refugees fleeing Burma in 1942, for whom elephants meant salvation. In recent history, elephants have been used in war not to scatter and intimidate the enemy’s front line but to avoid confrontation with the enemy altogether: to hide, avoid, and escape. This is a pattern which we’ll see extended to Vietnam during the 1960s (Chapter 5) and to the Kachin Hills of northern Burma up to the present day (Chapter 8). But elephants rarely if ever play this role in storytelling conventions shaped, in part, by the ancient Western world’s dramatic and ultimately abortive experiment with the elephant as a weapon of violent combat.
WHAT ABOUT African elephant domestication in lands farther south, beyond Axum? European explorers’ records from the nineteenth century give us a few indirect hints of indigenous elephant domestication in central and southern Africa. These hints are obscure and unreliable but also tantalizingly suggestive. During the 1810s, the British missionary and explorer John Campbell traveled among the Tswana peoples of southern Africa. His guides told him of a group to their northeast—near Maputo Bay, in modern-day Mozambique—who “rode on elephants” and “used elephants as beasts of burden.” The Tswana called this group the Mahalaseela people, which may translate as “people of the road” or “people of the cloth.” According to Campbell’s informants, this northeastern neighbor also taught other tribes in the region how to inoculate against smallpox. Campbell opined that the Mahalaseela had coastal trading links with the Portuguese (whose maritime empire extended to India). Little else is known about the group.31 Whoever they were, and whatever their true relationship with elephants, their way of life was likely radically disrupted by the Mfecane or forced migration wars among the region’s polities, which took place soon after Campbell’s information-gathering expeditions of the 1810s.
A comparable secondhand mention of indigenous elephant domestication in southern Africa comes from the records of the Scottish explorer David Livingstone. In 1869 Livingstone reported in a letter to a friend that he had found an indigenous people in the Maniema region of central Africa, just west of the African Great Lakes, who said their ancestors “tamed and rode elephants.” Livingstone added that there was “a total absence of the idea south of this”—so we can deduce that he was unaware of Campbell’s report from a half-century earlier, about the supposed Mahalaseela elephant riders.32
One reason Livingstone pressed his Maniema hosts for information about local traditions of elephant riding was his desire to suggest a historical link between the peoples of the African Great Lakes and the peoples of the classical Mediterranean world. Livingstone, like numerous other European explorers of the African interior, hoped to demonstrate that after the classical era, “Hamitic” peoples from northeastern Africa, with strong genealogical and cultural links to Egypt and to Hellenic
antiquity, penetrated into the interior of the African continent, following the Great Rift Valley, and settled near the source of the Nile. The theory was based mainly on the fact that the Ptolemaic Egyptians had possessed some partial understanding of the Nile up to its source. The ancient Greek-Egyptian geographer Claudius Ptolemy had recorded that the river began at two lakes that drained the “Mountains of the Moon.”33 These could very well be lakes Victoria and Albert, which drain into the Nile, and the Rwenzori Mountains, which have snowy peaks and partially drain into Lake Albert. Livingstone and his contemporaries supposed that if quasi-Hellenic, “Hamitic” peoples living in the Lower Nile during the classical period had good geographical knowledge of the upper Nile, then perhaps during the eventual Arab invasions of northeastern Africa, these groups retreated southward, passing through Meroe and Axum, and settled in the continental interior—bringing their knowledge of elephant domestication with them. Bolstered by nineteenth-century Western racial attitudes, these searches for lost “Mediterranean” peoples stimulated popular interest in and support for expeditions at the outermost frontiers of European empire.34
Subsequent ethnographers in the Maniema region do not seem to have found anything echoing Livingstone’s report. Maybe Livingstone, overeager to find some artifact or oral memory that could link the African interior with the ancient Mediterranean world, had asked the indigenous people in Maniema a set of leading questions in order to get a desired result. Or perhaps some Maniema tribes really did have such a tradition, and Livingstone talked with the last individuals who still spoke of it. If they did have such a tradition, it would not necessarily follow that their elephant-domesticating knowledge came from the Mediterranean sphere.
Livingstone likely had elephant domestication on his mind for additional reasons, besides this wish to associate Great Lakes peoples with the classical Mediterranean. In 1868, a year before Livingstone’s letter, the British had invaded Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) and brought with them forty-four Asian elephants, with Indian mahouts, to assist in transportation and logistics. The idea of instituting elephant-based transportation in sub-Saharan Africa gained momentum among European explorers and colonists between the 1860s and 1890s. European colonists were aware of the severe limitations that the tsetse fly placed on horses and mules in the African tropics. African elephants seemed impervious to the fly, but nobody knew if they could be tamed effectively. If Asian transport elephants could be brought into Ethiopia, which is at a transitional latitude between northern and equatorial Africa, perhaps they could be brought into the tropical tsetse zone as well. And if such an experiment failed, then Europeans could try to devise a way to train African elephants, or perhaps find some half-lost indigenous tradition of doing so, such as the Maniema tradition referred to by Livingstone.35
The Belgian Empire’s King Leopold financed the one major experiment in introducing domesticated Asian elephants into tropical Africa as a means of transportation. It took place in 1879. Leopold was especially eager to establish an elephant-based transport service for his vast domain in the Congo, where human porters, nearly all of whom were enslaved laborers, tended to flee at the first available opportunity. Leopold hired an Englishman who, along with a group of Indian mahouts, brought four Asian elephants from India to Tanganyika.
The elephants were marched across the arid grasslands toward Lake Tanganyika, the huge, long body of water that marks the beginning of the westward-flowing Congo basin. Many of the Indian mahouts, seeing the conditions of the landscape and the available vegetation, had misgivings about the expedition and turned back. The elephants got sick, either because many of their skilled attendants had left, or because the ground vegetation was inappropriate for them. The problem was not, apparently, the tsetse fly. At any rate, Leopold’s experiment had failed.36
In the early twentieth century, Belgian colonists in the Congo turned their attention to the domestication of the native elephant species. Hiring mahouts from Ceylon and eventually employing indigenous labor from the Congolese Azande people, the Belgians created training centers for African elephants at several locations in the northeastern Congo. By the 1930s, the mahouts at the domestication camps were all Congolese, and they’d developed methods quite unlike those in South Asia. The African elephants mainly pulled large wagons. One English visitor was impressed by the African pachyderms’ acumen in performing the job. Should the wagon brakes fail going down a hill, noted the visitor, the elephants would “seize hold of the wagon-pole in their trunks and throw back their full weight on the loaded wagon. . . . I have seen them doing this on their own initiative.”37 Though the training centers showed the promise of the domesticated African elephant, the need for elephants as a mode of transportation declined in sub-Saharan Africa as motor transport became more widespread.38 Nonetheless, the precedent set by the Congolese camps eventually proved useful in the establishment of elephant safari parks elsewhere in southern Africa, such as in Botswana and South Africa.39
EVEN IF WE SUPPOSE that Campbell’s and Livingstone’s nineteenth-century informants provided them with good information, and that the Mahalaseela and Maniema peoples really were riders of African elephants—and even if we suppose that other sub-Saharan African peoples elsewhere domesticated elephants too but left even less trace of having done so—a question still lingers: why does Asia have a continuous history of elephant domestication, enduring for millennia, whereas in Africa it occurred so sporadically? The Luba kingdom in the eastern Congo, the powerful Songhai Empire in West Africa, the Great Zimbabwe kingdom in the south—they were all surrounded by large herds of elephants. Yet people in these areas either hunted them or simply left them alone. Being strong and intelligent and naturally resistant to the tsetse fly, the elephants were the best local candidate for animal domestication. So why weren’t Africa’s powerful kingdoms and empires domesticating elephants as the kingdoms of India and Southeast Asia were?
The likely explanation is perhaps counterintuitive and has to do with the intensity of historical processes of deforestation in Asia as opposed to Africa. In Asia, the growth of immense agricultural civilizations in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and the Great Plain of China erased vast forestlands. Over several thousand years, these societies built up dense human populations and expanded deep into the surrounding sylvan regions. Biological evidence shows that only a few millennia ago, Asian elephants, today so closely associated with hills and forests, once dwelled on these open plains—that they used to be grazers feasting on grasses, rather than forest browsers munching on bamboo leaves, creepers, and vines.40 The large, agriculturally intensive societies of India and China, which together over many millennia have contained a significant percentage of the world’s human population, pushed the elephants out of these plains.
As these agricultural civilizations expanded into elephant habitat, an individual elephant faced four possible trajectories. One, if the elephant maintained its original habitat in the plains, it faced great peril from the farmers tending new paddies and fields. Two, the elephant could flee into the forest, having learned that all humans are the enemy. This elephant would have a better shot at survival than the first one, but in the forest, it could easily meet people who hunted elephants for ivory or meat. Furthermore, the elephant would likely have no real sense of where the farmers would next breach the forest margin. This elephant could easily find itself trapped in a small, isolated pocket of forest—still alive but unable to mate with a large herd.
In a third scenario, the elephant might be captured by humans associated with an expanding agricultural kingdom. This elephant would march in royal parades and religious festivals, or it would become a combat elephant and fight armies in some distant battlefield. This elephant would likely spend much of its life in a stable with very limited mating opportunities, or perish in battle, either fate being a genetic death.
Needless to say, none of these first three possible trajectories was particularly good for contributing to species survival. But there was a fourth p
ossible path. As agricultural societies were expanding, they were displacing not only large animals like elephants but human populations too, usually smaller farming cultures. Faced with the prospect of absorption into a much larger and more expansive agricultural empire, these groups chose, for one reason or another (fear of enslavement, determination to preserve language and spiritual practices, etc.), to migrate into the forested hills rather than stay put. Fleeing their old lands and arriving in new ones, these “fugitive” cultures would clear forestland and irrigate paddies to some extent; but mostly they had to adopt new crop-production techniques, especially swidden (shifting field) agriculture, more in keeping with the limits and possibilities of mountain ecology.41 Some political geographers and anthropologists even use a special toponym for the uplands of South and Southeast Asia, “Zomia” (from zomi, which means “highlanders” in the patois of the Naga Hills). This region has been a kind of layered receptacle for different waves of people who fled powerful kingdoms in the adjacent lowlands and underwent self-reinvention up in the hills.42
Most of northeastern India and Southeast Asia’s elephant-domesticating hill tribes underwent this experience of group exodus and self-reinvention. The Kachins were pushed out of Yunnan after a series of Mongol and Han invasions there.43 Moving into the upper Irrawaddy Valley and the Hukawng Valley, they then displaced many of the Hkamti Shans of that region, many of whom in turn fled across the Patkai Mountains to the Lohit and Dihing valleys.44 The Was, a swidden-practicing, elephant-domesticating people in the northern Shan Hills, were displaced into that region’s mountain forests by expansions of Tai-speaking kingdoms in nearby valleys.45 The Khas, who have had a mahoutship culture in the forests of Laos, fled from the Vietnamese coastal plain in 100 B.C., pushed out by Lao peoples who were fleeing an invasion from China.46 The Karens, along the hilly border country between Burma and Thailand, appear to be an admixture of different groups that migrated from expanding agricultural kingdoms in different lowland areas: from the lower Irrawaddy (in Lower Burma), from the lower Chao-Praya (in central Thailand), and from the Zimme Plain (in northern Thailand). Hence the various Karen languages mix elements of Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic, and Tai.47
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