The Emperor Who Vanished: Strange Facts from Indian History by Mandana Kavitha
Author:Mandana, Kavitha [Mandana, Kavitha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789388070102
Published: 2018-10-09T16:00:00+00:00
Elephants in the snow
In 218 BCE, Hannibal was a brilliant general of the Carthage empire that stretched all along North Africa on the Mediterranean coast. Rome and Carthage were at war. Hannibal had decided to take the fight to Roman territory, so he crossed the sea and landed his army of 100,000 soldiers and thirty-seven elephants in Spain. There he fought the Romans and the Gauls. The battle didn’t end there.
In an unimaginable feat, Hannibal then marched his soldiers, horsemen and elephants towards Italy, crossing the Alps and attacked Rome from the north. The Romans were stunned, and being caught unprepared, lost a series of battles to Hannibal as he charged further and further south, closer to Rome. Hundreds of thousands of Romans died in these battles, demoralized and terrorized by elephants, an animal they’d never seen before.
Hannibal eventually returned to Carthage, but without capturing Rome. Sadly, apart from the thousands of soldiers he lost in this war, he returned with only one elephant...the one he rode and whom he called Surrus, which implied ‘the Syrian’.
Syria never had native elephants, but during that period, in an exchange of gifts with an Indian king, Syrian rulers received a number of elephants sent along with Indian ambassadors. Later, in a battle with Egypt, the Egyptians captured these elephants and brought them back to North Africa. Since the Egyptians and Cartheginians were allies, some Indian elephants are believed to have come to Carthage.
This seems plausible, because of two reasons. One, North Africa, too, did not have an elephant population. Elephants roamed the African plains only from below the Sahara. Also, African elephants have never been domesticated or trained like Asian elephants. So strange though it seems, over 2,200 years ago, a ‘regiment’ of elephants faced a far more arduous trek than the fourteen elephants sent to Russia in 1739 CE.
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