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This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully

This isn’t entirely down to arbitrary cultural preference. Terrain and enemy composition are relevant. All of the cultures that used war elephants successfully lived and mostly fought in elephant habitats. Likewise, cultures on or close to the steppe had much more of a cavalry focus because cavalry was so much more effective there. When the Romans went east, they didn’t stick to their heavy infantry, they developed cataphracts. And their eventual conquerors, the Turks, replaced most of their traditional cavalry with infantry as they expanded westward into Europe.

jltsiren 1y ago
It's less about cultural preferences and more about fighting with what you have. If you have a feudal society based on personal relationships between the elites, you probably can't raise large bodies of heavy infantry. You don't have the people trained to fight in formation, you don't have the resources to equip them, and you don't have the capacity to organize them. Instead, you have the elites, who are often well trained and equipped. The elites have their personal retainers, who are pretty much the same. There can be some mercenaries if you can afford them. And then there are commoners who have to fight for various reasons but often lack both training and equipment. Elephants used to be native to North Africa, until the Roman Empire drove the subspecies to extinction. Carthaginians, Romans, and some Macedonian kingdoms used them in war. Persians and other Macedonian kingdoms imported elephants from India. But none of them fielded more than tens of elephants at once, at which scale infantry was capable of countering them. Some contemporary Indian kingdoms found it practical to have hundreds of elephants on the battlefield, which was qualitatively a different situation.
- philwelch 1y ago
  You fight with what you have but then sometimes you lose to someone who has a better army than you do and disappear from history. So in the long run you end up fighting with what actually works in your terrain. And I think it's very interesting that horses, who are only really indigenous to the steppe, ended up proliferating over the entire earth in a way that elephants did not. Hundreds of elephants on the battlefield sounds great if you can feed them though!

jltsiren 1y ago

It's less about cultural preferences and more about fighting with what you have. If you have a feudal society based on personal relationships between the elites, you probably can't raise large bodies of heavy infantry. You don't have the people trained to fight in formation, you don't have the resources to equip them, and you don't have the capacity to organize them. Instead, you have the elites, who are often well trained and equipped. The elites have their personal retainers, who are pretty much the same. There can be some mercenaries if you can afford them. And then there are commoners who have to fight for various reasons but often lack both training and equipment. Elephants used to be native to North Africa, until the Roman Empire drove the subspecies to extinction. Carthaginians, Romans, and some Macedonian kingdoms used them in war. Persians and other Macedonian kingdoms imported elephants from India. But none of them fielded more than tens of elephants at once, at which scale infantry was capable of countering them. Some contemporary Indian kingdoms found it practical to have hundreds of elephants on the battlefield, which was qualitatively a different situation.

philwelch 1y ago
You fight with what you have but then sometimes you lose to someone who has a better army than you do and disappear from history. So in the long run you end up fighting with what actually works in your terrain. And I think it's very interesting that horses, who are only really indigenous to the steppe, ended up proliferating over the entire earth in a way that elephants did not. Hundreds of elephants on the battlefield sounds great if you can feed them though!