7 ms·

War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)

130 points by plat12 6y ago

nickbauman 6y ago
"Moreover, the Roman elephants were smaller African elephants, effectively useless against the large Asian elephants the Seleucids used" I thought African elephants were larger than Asian elephants?
- rendall 6y ago
  I was just coming here to comment on this. The blog is "Unmitigated Pedantry" after all so I think this kind of detail would be appreciated
  - strulovich 6y ago
    It is mentioned in one of the captions.
- z3phyr 6y ago
  There were two kinds of African Elephants; one from North Africa were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation. North African elephants were very small and lightly built compared to Asian varieties. The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are familiar were never domesticated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation That would be a highly unusual trajectory. Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity. And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.
    - DavidAdams 6y ago
      My guess is that these elephants weren't actually domesticated, but rather tamed. That is, as with Asian elephants, they were captured in the wild rather than raised in captivity.
  - marci 6y ago
    There were three african species, now there are two: - the (bigger) african bush elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant) - the (smaller) african forest elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant)
  - InfiniteRand 6y ago
    Was over-exploitation really the key factor in North African elephants going extinct? I always thought it was due to increasing desertification + the expansion of human settlement in North Africa, but that's just idle speculation
ekanes 6y ago
Definitely interesting, but the post isn't about elephants vs wolves (no wolves are mentioned!) but about why the Romans didn't adopt the use of elephants in war. TLDR; Despite being theoretically SUPERBADASS (my words), elephants are only somewhat effective against prepared armies, but are expensive and hard to maintain, especially compared to horses.
- z3phyr 6y ago
  The Wolves are representative of the Romans! Legend has it that the founders of Rome were raised by a she wolf! A lot of roman cultural items have an imagery of the she wolf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus
  - ekanes 6y ago
    Oh, of course. Sigh. Thanks.
- smogcutter 6y ago
  The wolves in this case are the Romans themselves (The wolf being a symbol of Rome thanks to the Romulus and Remus myth). republican light infantry wore wolf pelts, and legionary standard bearers wore animal pelt headdresses, including wolves.
  - ekanes 6y ago
    Thanks!
- wavefunction 6y ago
  And the elephants were explicitly linked to three war-elephant using states absorbed by the Roman Empire, Carthage, Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Empire.
doytch 6y ago
If anyone is new to his blog and finds this series entertaining, his series on Sparta is amazing and incredibly insightful: https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/ https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/
smogcutter 6y ago
It’s interesting that his analysis of war elephants has a lot of parallels to his thoughts about chemical weapons. In the hands of a sufficiently advanced military, both are an expensive, complicated solution in search of a problem, and both are easily neutralized by a peer competitor. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
- padobson 6y ago
  both are easily neutralized by a peer competitor. This is what I was thinking the whole time. Rome was surrounded by peer competitors, and OP says their most effective use of elephants was against non-peer competitors like Spain or Gaul. So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not because Roma was susceptible, but because THEIR boarder competitors were susceptible. Elephants were not worth it to defeat well-trained troops, but were more than worth it to defeat smaller, less disciplined armies/militias. My guess is that Rome's peers were often using elephants to keep smaller competitors in check, and only used them against Rome because they happen to have them anyway.
  - dddddaviddddd 6y ago
    > So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not specifically for Rome's competitors, but elephants were kept also for prestige reasons in other regions, as described in this follow-up article: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part-iii-elephant-memories/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part...
  - mcguire 6y ago
    IIRC, horses. Cavalry can't be used around elephants unless the horses are specifically trained to be around elephants. Rome itself of the Republican/early Imperial era didn't use cavalry, although some of their allies did. As a hypothesis, those using elephants may have been fighting entities that used cavalry.
  - setr 6y ago
    Perhaps not coincidentally the same can be said of chemical warfare -- not so great in large scale war, but fairly effective against poor, untrained militia and enforcing order through fear on civilian populations
faitswulff 6y ago
I’m really appreciating the video game references - literally the article mentions the cost of elephants relative to horses in the Total War and Imperator series: > Let’s take Total War: Rome II as an example: a unit of Roman (auxiliary) African elephants (12 animals), costs 180 upkeep, compared to 90 to 110 upkeep for 80 horses of auxiliary cavalry (there are quite a few types) – so one elephant (with a mahout) costs 15 upkeep against around 1.25 for a horse and rider (a 12:1 ratio). Paradox’s Imperator does something similar, with a single unit of war elephants requiring 1.08 upkeep, compared to just 0.32 for light cavalry; along with this, elephants have a heavy ‘supply weight’ – twice that of an equivalent number of cavalry (so something like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of cost). > Believe it or not, this understates just how hungry – and expensive – elephants are. The standard barley ration for a Roman horse was 7kg of barley per day (7 Attic medimnoi per month; Plb. 6.39.12); this would be supplemented by grazing. Estimates for the food requirements of elephants vary widely (in part, it is hard to measure the dietary needs of grazing animals), but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder – and remember, the preference in war elephants is for large, mature adult males, meaning that most war elephants will be towards the top of this range. Accounting for some grazing (probably significantly less than half of dietary needs) a large adult male elephant is thus likely to need something like 15 to 30 times the food to sustain itself as a stable-fed horse.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Can confirm. Back in India, my grandparents had a driver who later won the lottery. He used the winnings to buy two elephants, what he thought were a good investment (elephants are regularly rented out for expensive sums to temples for functions and celebrations). Now he's a driver once more. But he has two elephants tho.
  - User23 6y ago
    I remember reading somewhere that Roman emperors would give troublesome patricians an elephant as a gift. If he let the elephant die it was a grave insult and the emperor would proscribe him and take all his stuff. And otherwise he’d be stuck paying for the upkeep of a useless elephant.
jungletime 6y ago
I would like to see wild elephants in a national park in the US. You can't really say they are not part of the eco system when mammoths only disappeared during the last ice age. Its basically the difference between a hairless cat. There are still plants around that relied on elephants to propagate them (osage orange)
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
During early wars between Islamic army vs Persian army in 634 AD, war elephants were crucial strategic weapons employed on the Persian side to rattle the horses of their opponents as the horses of Islamic army had never seen an elephant before. Though the strategy worked, Persian side still lost as the Islamic army regrouped and specifically targeted the carriage harness to topple the rider, blinded the elephants and made them run amok causing disarray within Persian faction or straight away killed the elephants with skilled warriors[1]. [1]https://youtu.be/r2cEIDZwG5M?t=3863 https://youtu.be/r2cEIDZwG5M?t=3863
- fakedang 6y ago
  To be fair to the Persian elephants, a large part of the Islamic victory against Persia was not because of any superior skill but because of severe infighting among the Persians. When the Arabs invaded, Persia was literally in the middle of a civil war. Soldiers and generals would betray their commanders midway during battles, and there was often zero coordination. The Romans on the other hand... lots of hubris and underestimating. There were some brilliant strategies employed by the Arab generals that are even thought in military schools to this day. For example, the time when Khalid bin Walid conquered the walled city of Antioch - without siege weaponry, but by drawing the Romans out by cunning.
mcguire 6y ago
"Livy – who appears to be quoting Polybius, a contemporary of the battle – is quite clear what he thinks of the elephants, “For as new inventions often have great force in the words of men, but when tried, when they need to work, and not just have their working described, they evaporate without any effect – just so the war elephants were just a name without any real use.” (Liv 44.41.4, my rough translation)." Livy's comments apply to so many things....
ajani 6y ago
"...but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder..." It should be pounds, not Kg. "Elephants eat roots, grasses, fruit, and bark, and they eat a lot of these things. An adult elephant can consume up to 300 pounds of food in a single day" From: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/a/african-elephant/#:~:text=Elephants%20eat%20roots%2C%20grasses%2C%20fruit,food%20in%20a%20single%20day https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/a/african....

130 points by plat12 6y ago

"Moreover, the Roman elephants were smaller African elephants, effectively useless against the large Asian elephants the Seleucids used" I thought African elephants were larger than Asian elephants?

rendall 6y ago
I was just coming here to comment on this. The blog is "Unmitigated Pedantry" after all so I think this kind of detail would be appreciated
- strulovich 6y ago
  It is mentioned in one of the captions.
z3phyr 6y ago
There were two kinds of African Elephants; one from North Africa were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation. North African elephants were very small and lightly built compared to Asian varieties. The White African Elephants of the Savanah, to which we all are familiar were never domesticated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > were domesticated and became extinct due to overexploitation That would be a highly unusual trajectory. Were they really domesticated? Indian elephants were never domesticated either, because it's more cost-effective to capture them from the wild than to invest the decades it takes to rear a calf in captivity. And this sort of arrangement is vastly more conducive to extinction through overexploitation than domesticating the animal would be.
  - DavidAdams 6y ago
    My guess is that these elephants weren't actually domesticated, but rather tamed. That is, as with Asian elephants, they were captured in the wild rather than raised in captivity.
- marci 6y ago
  There were three african species, now there are two: - the (bigger) african bush elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant) - the (smaller) african forest elephant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_forest_elephant)
- InfiniteRand 6y ago
  Was over-exploitation really the key factor in North African elephants going extinct? I always thought it was due to increasing desertification + the expansion of human settlement in North Africa, but that's just idle speculation

ekanes 6y ago

Definitely interesting, but the post isn't about elephants vs wolves (no wolves are mentioned!) but about why the Romans didn't adopt the use of elephants in war. TLDR; Despite being theoretically SUPERBADASS (my words), elephants are only somewhat effective against prepared armies, but are expensive and hard to maintain, especially compared to horses.

z3phyr 6y ago
The Wolves are representative of the Romans! Legend has it that the founders of Rome were raised by a she wolf! A lot of roman cultural items have an imagery of the she wolf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus
- ekanes 6y ago
  Oh, of course. Sigh. Thanks.
smogcutter 6y ago
The wolves in this case are the Romans themselves (The wolf being a symbol of Rome thanks to the Romulus and Remus myth). republican light infantry wore wolf pelts, and legionary standard bearers wore animal pelt headdresses, including wolves.
- ekanes 6y ago
  Thanks!
wavefunction 6y ago
And the elephants were explicitly linked to three war-elephant using states absorbed by the Roman Empire, Carthage, Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid Empire.

doytch 6y ago

If anyone is new to his blog and finds this series entertaining, his series on Sparta is amazing and incredibly insightful: https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/ https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/

smogcutter 6y ago

It’s interesting that his analysis of war elephants has a lot of parallels to his thoughts about chemical weapons. In the hands of a sufficiently advanced military, both are an expensive, complicated solution in search of a problem, and both are easily neutralized by a peer competitor. https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

padobson 6y ago
both are easily neutralized by a peer competitor. This is what I was thinking the whole time. Rome was surrounded by peer competitors, and OP says their most effective use of elephants was against non-peer competitors like Spain or Gaul. So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not because Roma was susceptible, but because THEIR boarder competitors were susceptible. Elephants were not worth it to defeat well-trained troops, but were more than worth it to defeat smaller, less disciplined armies/militias. My guess is that Rome's peers were often using elephants to keep smaller competitors in check, and only used them against Rome because they happen to have them anyway.
- dddddaviddddd 6y ago
  > So why would competitors continue to use elephants? Not specifically for Rome's competitors, but elephants were kept also for prestige reasons in other regions, as described in this follow-up article: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part-iii-elephant-memories/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part...
- mcguire 6y ago
  IIRC, horses. Cavalry can't be used around elephants unless the horses are specifically trained to be around elephants. Rome itself of the Republican/early Imperial era didn't use cavalry, although some of their allies did. As a hypothesis, those using elephants may have been fighting entities that used cavalry.
- setr 6y ago
  Perhaps not coincidentally the same can be said of chemical warfare -- not so great in large scale war, but fairly effective against poor, untrained militia and enforcing order through fear on civilian populations

faitswulff 6y ago

I’m really appreciating the video game references - literally the article mentions the cost of elephants relative to horses in the Total War and Imperator series: > Let’s take Total War: Rome II as an example: a unit of Roman (auxiliary) African elephants (12 animals), costs 180 upkeep, compared to 90 to 110 upkeep for 80 horses of auxiliary cavalry (there are quite a few types) – so one elephant (with a mahout) costs 15 upkeep against around 1.25 for a horse and rider (a 12:1 ratio). Paradox’s Imperator does something similar, with a single unit of war elephants requiring 1.08 upkeep, compared to just 0.32 for light cavalry; along with this, elephants have a heavy ‘supply weight’ – twice that of an equivalent number of cavalry (so something like a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio of cost). > Believe it or not, this understates just how hungry – and expensive – elephants are. The standard barley ration for a Roman horse was 7kg of barley per day (7 Attic medimnoi per month; Plb. 6.39.12); this would be supplemented by grazing. Estimates for the food requirements of elephants vary widely (in part, it is hard to measure the dietary needs of grazing animals), but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder – and remember, the preference in war elephants is for large, mature adult males, meaning that most war elephants will be towards the top of this range. Accounting for some grazing (probably significantly less than half of dietary needs) a large adult male elephant is thus likely to need something like 15 to 30 times the food to sustain itself as a stable-fed horse.

fakedang 6y ago
Can confirm. Back in India, my grandparents had a driver who later won the lottery. He used the winnings to buy two elephants, what he thought were a good investment (elephants are regularly rented out for expensive sums to temples for functions and celebrations). Now he's a driver once more. But he has two elephants tho.
- User23 6y ago
  I remember reading somewhere that Roman emperors would give troublesome patricians an elephant as a gift. If he let the elephant die it was a grave insult and the emperor would proscribe him and take all his stuff. And otherwise he’d be stuck paying for the upkeep of a useless elephant.

jungletime 6y ago

I would like to see wild elephants in a national park in the US. You can't really say they are not part of the eco system when mammoths only disappeared during the last ice age. Its basically the difference between a hairless cat. There are still plants around that relied on elephants to propagate them (osage orange)

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

During early wars between Islamic army vs Persian army in 634 AD, war elephants were crucial strategic weapons employed on the Persian side to rattle the horses of their opponents as the horses of Islamic army had never seen an elephant before. Though the strategy worked, Persian side still lost as the Islamic army regrouped and specifically targeted the carriage harness to topple the rider, blinded the elephants and made them run amok causing disarray within Persian faction or straight away killed the elephants with skilled warriors[1]. [1]https://youtu.be/r2cEIDZwG5M?t=3863 https://youtu.be/r2cEIDZwG5M?t=3863

fakedang 6y ago
To be fair to the Persian elephants, a large part of the Islamic victory against Persia was not because of any superior skill but because of severe infighting among the Persians. When the Arabs invaded, Persia was literally in the middle of a civil war. Soldiers and generals would betray their commanders midway during battles, and there was often zero coordination. The Romans on the other hand... lots of hubris and underestimating. There were some brilliant strategies employed by the Arab generals that are even thought in military schools to this day. For example, the time when Khalid bin Walid conquered the walled city of Antioch - without siege weaponry, but by drawing the Romans out by cunning.

mcguire 6y ago

"Livy – who appears to be quoting Polybius, a contemporary of the battle – is quite clear what he thinks of the elephants, “For as new inventions often have great force in the words of men, but when tried, when they need to work, and not just have their working described, they evaporate without any effect – just so the war elephants were just a name without any real use.” (Liv 44.41.4, my rough translation)." Livy's comments apply to so many things....

ajani 6y ago

"...but elephants require in excess of 1.5% of their body-weight in food per day. Estimates for the dietary requirements of the Asian elephant can range from 135 to 300kg per day in a mix of grazing and fodder..." It should be pounds, not Kg. "Elephants eat roots, grasses, fruit, and bark, and they eat a lot of these things. An adult elephant can consume up to 300 pounds of food in a single day" From: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/a/african-elephant/#:~:text=Elephants%20eat%20roots%2C%20grasses%2C%20fruit,food%20in%20a%20single%20day https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/a/african....