The Ancients - Beasts of Battle: Indian War Elephants

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

The four components of the Ancient Indian battlefield: infantry, cavalry, chariots … and elephants. These magnificent creatures were dominant in conflicts to the east of India, in South-East Asia, but also to the west, in Greece and Africa. For this episode, Anirudh Kanisetti and Tristan discussed the role of Indian war elephants, their strengths, weaknesses and training; and what they tell us about Ancient India. Anirudh’s own podcasts, Yuddha, which is dedicated to Indian Military history, and Echoes of India, which embraces the whole of Indian history, can be found here: https://www.anirudhkanisetti.com/podcasts

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, we are talking once again about the war elephant in antiquity.

Last time, we focused on the war elephant in the Seleucid or the Seleucid Empire. But this time, we are going to the true home of the war elephant, because we're talking about ancient India. Now, I was delighted to be joined by Anirudh Kanisetti. Anirudh has two podcasts all about the history of India and you can find links to them in the description below. This was a great chat, really eye-opening chat and without further ado here's Anirudh. further ado, here's Anirudh. Anirudh, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me, Tristan. Well, no problem at all, because this is an amazing topic. Indian war elephants. I mean, Anirudh, India, this feels like the true home of the war elephant, at least in antiquity.

Yes, it seems to be from what we can tell the place where the idea of domesticating the elephant for war really originated and also continued to be the source of war elephants for most of classical antiquity as far as we know. So let's dive into the background first of all. And I appreciate you probably don't know exact dates for this. But Anirudh, when do we think the whole idea of the war elephant was invented in india so um that's kind of a difficult thing to like really pin down partially because of the lack of written records through much of early india so really the the first known record of like a written language in india comes from much later from roughly 200-250 BC or so but it's very obvious that a lot of really interesting stuff was going on from what we can

tell of the oral records that were preserved up till that time so if you for example look at a Buddhist text which the earliest origins of which might have happened roughly around the 5th century BC or so war elephants seem to be a fairly well-established fact of life we have an incident where the king, who is apparently jealous of the Buddha's popularity, basically has a bunch of like mad elephants set upon him, who of course in classic Buddhist fashion are overwhelmed by the peacefulness of the Buddha and don't attack him at all. But clearly even that act is coming at a time when war elephants have become a fact of life and can be

seen in cities and most significantly are under the command of kings so kings are associated with the capturing of elephants from a very early period so there's a bunch of prospective dates when this could have happened we know for example that when the indo-aryans were in the punjab and were composing the earliest vedas which would have been roughly around 1200 BC or so, these people had no idea what the hell an elephant was. So they call it a Mrigahasthin, which basically means the animal with a hand on its nose, because that's what a trunk was like, you know, they describe the elephant as something that can grab things that's trunk. And so we know that that is basically the point where elephants were not known. And we know that by about 500 BC or so elephants were known. So I think it's

reasonable to assume that perhaps by about 700 or 600 BC or so war elephants were increasingly being tamed and were being used on Indian battlefields. Further on from that then Anirudh, another key question I'd just like to ask quickly before really going into the first of these kingdoms that we're going into is this term which I saw mentioned quite a lot in the research for this podcast which is that of the fourfold army what is the importance of the war elephant in this fourfold army so the fourfold army basically refers to the four components of the ancient Indian battlefield which are infantry cavalry chariots and of course elephants so this is kind of a hotly debated topic because it's kind of debatable how long the chariot was really a part of the battlefield like especially when you're

looking at regions like the deccan for example which has a much rockier terrain which isn't as suitable for moving chariots around but it seems at least in the earliest period when you're looking at the emergence of early kingdoms in the gangetic Plains, which is a period that's often referred to as the second urbanization of India after the first urbanization, which happened in the Indus Valley. So you have the second urbanization and you see the emergence of all these new kingdoms and what we call Ganarajas or republics. That's hopefully something we'll get to later. But we have all these polities with very diverse forms of governance. Then all of them are obviously trying to pry natural resources away from each other keep in mind that the gangetic plains are not dominated

by just one i mean they are dominated by one river but there's this whole bunch of tributaries which make up this this vast expanse right and all these tributaries were really important to these kingdoms because they could be used as essentially maritime highways to move goods and troops along and also for of course we can imagine irrigation and therefore control of the rivers would have been important to the resources that any of these states could really mobilize. So as a result, these guys are clearly descendants of like these, these Indo-Aryans and also the indigenous populations. We know that the Indo-Aryans were very well known for using chariots. We have all this poetry from the Vedas describing gods on chariots and heroes on chariots and so on and it's very similar to

your indo-european cultures from the rest of the world of course um but so it seems that the infantry thing i mean that's fairly obvious that chariots are a legacy of this indo-aryan heritage and of course um you have cavalry which again it's it's kind of debatable uh whether chariots were more in vogue or actual guys mountain horses were more in vogue given that the stirrup wasn't really a thing in early India until this inventor in China much later and to this three-fold army was added roughly around the 600 BC period or so the war elephant as well and while initially the war elephant wasn't really considered to be the most prestigious of the army as it were, you start to see the Indian tacticians. It's the weapon of kings, of princes. You have these royal elephant corps, essentially,

that are stampeding out to exploit holes in enemy formations and all that. So it's really amazing to think of what a long and deep and complex history the war elephant has as a military instrument in India and how it constantly changes and evolves to different kind of tactical and strategic conditions. Well, you mentioned that, yes, it's evolution. That sounds absolutely extraordinary. And we'll get onto that soon, I'm sure. it constantly changes and evolves to different kind of tactical and strategic conditions. Well, you mentioned that. Yes, it's evolution. That sounds absolutely extraordinary. And we'll get onto that soon, I'm sure. But you mentioned how you see all these different kingdoms emerging along the Ganges. So let's focus on one of these key kingdoms that we see seem to merge right at the start of this period with the war elephants. Because Anirudh, it seems that we've got this one

kingdom, which seems at first to be one of the most prominent, which is, and forgive my pronunciation, the Magadan kingdom. Yeah. So Magadha, according to the historian Thomas Trotman, might have been the very first kingdom to actually start to use war elephants on the battlefield. I feel like it seems like a bit of a leap, given the lack of evidence that I highlighted a little earlier ago. But it does seem that by the time of the buddha by the 5th century bc or so magadha certainly the dominant

kingdom among all the north indian kingdoms and these guys are embarking on fairly aggressive campaigns of conquest against their neighbors further up the gangetic plains and very often you you see magadhan kings being depicted using elephants interestingly enough after the death of the buddha we are told that some of his remains were distributed on elephant back to various sites that he had visited which once again kind of indicates that the elephant is already being seen as a animal that's associated with royalty the magadhan kingdom is not too far from the chota nagpur plateau so even today the chota nagpur plateau is a fairly important kind of site for obtaining minerals and we can imagine that it

was something similar for magadha as well back then because it helped them get access to iron ore and of course it helped them get access to elephants now one interesting thing about the elephant is that it very often seems it was usually these kind of centralized polities like kingdoms that could get access to them because it requires a significant investment of men and material to get your hands on elephant and elephant hunt is not an easy thing so magatha seems to have really gone out of its way to really modernize its military as it were by getting access to larger and larger number of elephants and of course getting access to large amounts of iron ore and we can see really captured in in tales as it were that it's starting to slowly steamroll the other kingdoms so by the time of buddha's death in roughly the fifth century magatha is already one of the dominant ones and then within the space of a couple of hundred years

it's managed to conquer almost the entirety of the Gangetic Plains, to the point where we know that by roughly the early 4th century or so, when Alexander arrives in northern India in Punjab, King of Punjab is using war elephants. So clearly, the tactical utility of the elephant has already been established so many miles away from where it originated. It's interesting what you're saying about how kingdoms seem to really bring in the war elephant into their militaries in this period. And you're saying that they have the resources there for the elephant hunting and everything like that. Anirudh, is there also a symbolic importance, what you're saying, a symbolic importance of the elephant for monarchies, for ancient Indian kingdoms and kings to show that they have this huge

animal in their arsenal, as it were? So were so like i said its position its importance kind of varies and evolves over time in the early period it doesn't seem like it was the preferred mode of royal combat as it were you see a lot of attention being given to chariots especially so if you look at a text like the mahabharata for example though the most recent recension of it the one that really survives to us today was probably composed in the early centuries ce if you look at coins from the early centuries bc when you had all these kingdoms you see kings usually depicted on chariots so it seems that the the doctrine of of controlling and riding elephants was not really that well developed at the time so there was always

a bit of a risk involved so you would have basically the suicide troops who would ride elephants and like they would have like perhaps pots of like flaming oil or you know or they would have javelins and bows and they would use these as like mobile archery platforms you know but they're not really very fast especially compared to chariots but much later like especially if you look at medieval india which is a period that I have a particular fascination for from roughly the 7th century onwards this is very decided shift in the way that Indian kingdoms see elephants and you see elephants being treated almost like kings so just as the king is basically put to sleep to the sounds of music and he's feasted every night and like woken up

with music and would have his own harem of women who were attending him you would see male elephants basically being put to sleep with music being given the most exotic food being put to sleep and awakened with music and of course having a harem of their own and they'd also be given titles depending on their performance in combat so there's a very clear parallel between the elephant and the king that is drawn by the medieval period which i think draws on the fact that you have a very different kind of polity in the medieval period compared to what you see in the ancient period which we're still talking about here that's very interesting anaru because you mentioned there alexander the greys how he comes to india in the indus valley and he fights an indian king porus the battle of the high daspes

river but it's interesting what you're saying there about how the royalty used to use, seem to mainly use chariots rather than riding on elephants. Because I swear if I remember in the sources, they talk about how Porus is riding an elephant rather than a chariot. Do you think this is therefore unlikely? You have to keep in mind that Porus is sitting in the Punjab. It's kind of far away from the real center of Indian urbanization and military development as it were, which is happening further down the Ganga Valley. And furthermore, if I recall correctly, Porus's son was supposedly on a chariot and led an attack against Alexander. So very clearly, there's an association of royalty with the chariot there as well. I think it's difficult to make a pan-subcontinental generalization based on a single fairly well-attested piece of evidence.

So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible that kings are already starting to run elephants. Like I said, Buddha's relics were distributed on elephant backs. So clearly there's a there's a little bit of how do I put this as a little bit of recalcitrance when it comes to kings adopting the elephant. It's nowhere near the kind of like royal and elephantine equivalents that you see later on, but you can see like perhaps the early seeds of it happening in that period. That's very interesting. Now, we've been talking about kingdoms in India at the moment, but Anirudh, it wasn't just kingdoms that we see, particularly through northern India in this period, was there? Yeah, that's an interesting point.

And once again, we have to kind of turn to the Buddhists to kind of give us a little peek into the way that these other polities were organized. We're told that when Buddha knew that he was on his last legs and he basically organized the monastic community to kind of continue preaching the doctrine after he died, he supposedly was inspired by the political system of his own people, the Shakyas. So he sets up basically this form of very rudimentary democracy, as it were, where every monk kind of has a say,

but the seniority of a monk depends on how old he is. So perhaps that was how his community was organized as well. Perhaps the Shakyas had many chiefs, basically leaders of different families who would have this kind of assembly where the oldest one would be taken more seriously or perhaps be the first to speak or something on those lines it's kind of difficult to say given the lack of evidence from the time a later text the artha shastra describes these polities and it basically recommends that a king should dismantle a republic by bribing each of his leaders so they can't agree on anything in the council and therefore are easy meat as it were so like i said when you when you have all

these new polities emerging you would expect to see a wide variety of different kinds of forms of political organization but there's one particular political form that is most effective at mobilizing the resources that's needed to really gain military dominance and that is the kingdom and so when magadha evolves kingship and when this kingship is able to get its hands on the military tool par excellence at the time namely the war elephant you slowly see all other polities shifting to more kinds of royal forms and this kind of form also going out and like extinguishing other republics and conquering them it's kind of this weird parallel to biological evolution as well right when you have a successful body plan that's kind of very rapidly copied by a whole bunch of other species and the ones that don't copy it effectively enough basically become extinct so it is really interesting to me to kind of see that playing out in the way

that human polities were organized as well so can we say then that these polities, they realize that to get their hands on more war elephants, it's easier to do that by becoming a kingdom. Let's say that's not always universal, but it seemed quite the case and that to survive as the ancient world evolves as it goes on and on, that to actually get your hand on all these war elephants is key to surviving. That really seems to be the case because how else would porus who is so far away from any potential threats from magadha or the magadan empire have war elephants very clearly the tactical utility was being recognized by other kingdoms and then this idea was slowly spreading and being picked up by other polities as well so i think this guy's he's actually a very interesting

historical figure though we have no indian records of. He tells us a great deal about India and Indian militaries at the time. Now, so let's keep on Porus then for a moment, because Alexander obviously faces Porus in battle with Porus with his elephants and all that. But Porus, the amount of elephants he has, it's relatively small compared to those giant kingdoms further east that Alexander only hears about that he never actually faces in battle. Yeah, so there's multiple possible reasons for that. It may be perhaps that elephants were just not found in large numbers in Punjab where King Porus was, and therefore that he didn't have as many. Or one could alternatively argue that Porus still saw the chariot as being more efficient and

more useful than the war elephant was, and therefore hadn't really gotten around to getting the same number of war elephants or they simply weren't as useful against the type of enemy that porus was fighting as compared to magadha for example it's really kind of difficult to say given how limited the evidence is from the time but we can certainly see that porus might have been the furthest west that the war elephant had gotten by the fourthth century BC. But soon after its interaction with the Greeks, you see the war elephant appearing much, much further west as well. So I think there's a case to be made that its tactical utility was also almost immediately recognised by Greek tacticians as well. It's remarkable that spread.

And as you say, it managed to get to northwest India by the 4th century BC. And then from there, with the successes, it goes all the way to the Mediterranean. We were chatting just before we went live about how by the start of the 3rd century BC, you maybe have Pyrrhus with Indian war elephants, it's not sure, but you might have Indian war elephants in Southern Italy in his campaigns against Rome, which is absolutely remarkable when you think of where it all started in Northeast India. It really blows my mind to think of basically a globalized weapons trade uh in in the third fourth century bc but that's exactly what it is as being enabled essentially by war and responding to new kind of tactical conditions and innovating to be at par with what

your enemies are doing as well right so i think if you look at the wars of the diadoca i hope i'm pronouncing that correctly um and if you look at the wars between the Diadochi, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. And if you look at the wars between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, especially, the Seleucids are basically importing war elephants by means of bacteria, and they're coming from India, obviously. And I think if I recall correctly, the Ptolemies are trying to get their hands on war elephants from as far away as Ethiopia. So essentially, these parts of the world that are very distant to the Mediterranean are still being linked by this expanding network of military exchange and being funneled into basically these globalized battlefields in the Middle East, which is so fascinating to think about.

It is, really is. And even further with the Ptolemies, you said the Red Sea, you're completely correct there. They actually may have used elephant transports to get some elephants from india before it was all really cut off by this lucas astonishing but enough hellenistic enough successes i can't go on that this is about indian war elephants let's go back to the heart of ancient indian kingdoms and especially northeast india because let's go on to this next amazing in my opinion one of the most extraordinary civilizations from the ancient world the mauryans anirudh how does the Mauryan Empire come about and what is this? All right, so I kind of feel like the Mauryans simultaneously get too much and too little attention when it comes to narratives about global history, right? Because there's almost this compulsive need that I see in Western historiography that if you see this big unified

empire emerging in the Hellenistic world, if you see this big unified Roman empire, then there must have been a big unified Indian empire and a big unified Chinese empire to parallel it. And in a way, it kind of is, but in a lot of other ways, it's really not. It's very different. So we talked a little earlier about the emergence of Magadha and its kind of route towards dominance by fighting much of the kingdoms of North India, right? So the elite that ruled over these north indian polities were basically headed upper caste men by descent right so these aristocratic bloodlines who are basically are driving their polities to constantly be at war with each other and it seems that after magadha really manages to conquer most of north india at some point just as in the rest of the world military service becomes a route to

advancement for people of lower birth as well so just as you see for example in ancient rome that because of a need for manpower you see these aristocrats slowly opening the doors as it were to plebeians and people who didn't have property entering the army something similar might have happened in ancient india as well where these men of low birth are rising to higher and higher military station and eventually overthrow the kingdoms that raise them up and take over so when Alexander was in north India the reason why his men supposedly didn't want to head into the gangetic prince was because they'd heard of this Nanda empire of northern India right the Nandas are very evidently this low-born a group of men who are like risen up and like

taken over north India and similarly there's a kind of power struggle of men who are like risen up and like taken over north india and similarly there's a kind of power struggle that emerges with the mauryas who perhaps are mercenaries who might have served even in alexander's campaigns but don't seem to have been magadha nobility right so they come to power and what do they do just as any roman strongman who has seized the imperial throne does they embark on aggressive military campaigns in the rest of the subcontinent to get access to resources and to basically get tribute to show to the citizens of pataliputra the capital of magadha and say look at us look how great we are and basically go on these triumphal expeditions so that's basically how the maurya empire the so-called subcontinent spanning empire the first quote-unquote indian empire starts to emerge it's because of the needs

of these north indian strongmen to get their hold on territory and resources to solidify their control over power in their own dominions i don't think it's a coincidence that we know that by 305 bc or so selucas nikator is fighting chandra gupta maurya on the banks in the indus river what the hell is a magadhan polity doing on the indus river that magadans have never gone to the indus as far as we know very obviously what we're seeing is that chandra gupta has embarked on this campaign to kind of like get his hands on resources and wealth and booty and happened to meet salukis and came to an arrangement with him which basically allowed the mauryas to retain control of this like wide periphery in northwest india in return

for like sending elephants further west and you can really imagine just what a brilliant political deal it was for chandragupta and you can see his successors doing the same things as well so bindu sara his son is known as i think amitrakatis in greek which might be a rendition of the indian word amitragata which basically means the eater or devourer of his foes. So once again, this guy is doing the same thing. He's a military strongman trying to extend his control to other parts of India, perhaps Western India, Gujarat were brought under the Mauryan reign during Bindusara's time as well as the Deccan. And quite significantly, we know from later Buddhist texts that Ashoka, his son really emerges to prominence because he's sent to put down rebellions in all to prominence because he's sent to put down

rebellions in all of these places. He's sent to put down a rebellion in Gandhara. So Gandhara in northwestern India seems to have had this unique sense that we don't want to be ruled by these Gangetic Valley people. Who the hell are these guys? And they're constantly revolting against them, right? And similarly, once again, when Ashoka comes to the throne by killing his brothers and all that, what does he do? He invades a new territory. He invades Kalanga. Once again, to establish through military control his capability of ruling. But that's when he does something really interesting, right?

Because that's when he seems to realize that military control isn't going to help the Mauryas keep control of this enormous territory indefinitely. And thus really does this thing that gives him his claim to fame in global history as it were his famous propaganda machine building pillar edicts and rock edicts all across this far-flung quote-unquote indian empire you've made so many brilliant keywords there shocker chandra gupta bundesara don't know where to start but first of all that expansion as you say absolutely extraordinary isn't it going from the ganges all the way to Gandhara and the Indus and I'm guessing

Anirudh from our sources because we're now getting into the literary sources period which is fantastic the sources that we have which talk about it I'm guessing they make

a key point of saying that war elephants are a key part in this expansion that's a surprising thing they don't really they don't

we don't see a lot of mentions of war elephants in fact we know that one of the southernmost limits of maurya expansion was the tamil polities right because ashoka in his edicts mentions that he has supposedly performed a dharma vijaya or a righteous conquest of the tamil kingdoms which is to say that he thinks that they basically accepted buddhism which they absolutely did not but in some of the literature of the early Tamil kingdoms,

which we call the Sangam literature, you see mentions of the Mauryan military, but they don't mention Mauryan elephants, they mention Mauryan chariots, and they mentioned the Mauryans building roads. It's so fascinating to me, because you kind of see this parallel with Rome almost in a way, you know, where building military infrastructure is basically the bread and butter of the Mauryan military. So these guys are actually carving through hills and so on, supposedly, to try and build a route which perhaps the chariots are able to negotiate. But war elephants are really not mentioned that frequently in Mauryan sources at all, as far as we know, at least as far as literature goes.

Art is like a whole other thing, right? So if you look at Mauryan and post-Mauryan art, you see elephants elephants represented quite frequently and you see them represented more often than not in in military roles so you see guys sitting on elephants guys with bows and arrows riding on elephants so it does seem like elephants did have a role to play but it's really difficult especially i mean ashoka is a guy who is putting up these pillar edicts and rock edicts. He, as far as we know, he actually invented a script. For the first time in Indian history, this guy invents a script in order to convey his message. Like, just think about how absolutely remarkable that is. These polities were somehow governing themselves, like organizing extremely complex systems of administration, of military organization, all that, apparently without any writing.

But the first time they decide they need writing is when they need to have a propaganda machine so Ashoka basically comes up with this Brahmi script descendants of which are still used today by the way and he puts this Brahmi script on these pillars and rocks near major pilgrimage sites and political centers and urban centers where he basically talks of himself as being a righteous man. So you should not follow me because I am a brute, though I can be a brute if I want to,

but I'm a righteous man and my family are righteous people and therefore you should follow us. And the last people who didn't follow us, the people of Kalinga, I basically got 150,000 of them and dispersed them across the entire country for defying me.

So he's such a remarkable guy you're thinking of a man who understands the politics of such a enormous territory and who has this worldview that basically pushes him to send embassies to cyprus to egypt to macedon like all over the greek world really so he has this enormous sense of himself and this enormous sense of what is needed to hold on to this empire and he also realizes that a military alone is not sufficient which is why he does all this political stuff as well but yeah it is really strange that elephants are not mentioned perhaps elephants are meant to be taken for granted perhaps even then the mauryas preferred to associate themselves with chariots as opposed to the elephant.

But again, it's really difficult to say, given that the texts that survive are mostly political in nature. Ranarid, that propaganda machine, that's absolutely remarkable. It almost sounds like, and correct me if I'm going up the wrong hill here, how Chandragupta and Bindusar, they've been doing all this expansion. Ashoka, still a military strongman, but he's also doing this consolidation. But these propaganda messages, it's like, behave or else. I've done it before to these people. I could do it again if you don't stay in line under my rule. Exactly.

I mean, that's the side of Ashoka's character that is very rarely talked about, right? When Ashoka is spoken of, it's like, oh, yeah, he's a Buddhist and he's so peaceful. And, you know, typical Indian, you're so spiritual and all that nonsense but if you actually read he seems like this genuinely earnest guy like don't make me do this to you but i will so help me god i will um and he he genuinely believes that he knows what is right for all these peoples who have never been ruled by a magadhan king and you really have to wonder what the hell gave this guy this extraordinary sense of himself. It's easily comparable to any of the great empire builders of history, right?

He's comparable to an Augustus Caesar. He's comparable to a Sargon of Akkad. The sheer audacity of it is breathtaking, you know? These people who have never been ruled by a North Indian polity, who in all likelihood don't even understand the languages this man is speaking, who don't know how to read the script that this man has invented, are being basically preached to that he's the benevolent, enlightened dictator of all India at this point. And you best listen to him and he's doing the best he can. And the thing is that it's all in his words, right? If you look at the text that most Indian kings publish, it's very rarely in their own voice.

It's always about, oh, this king was so great and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And his father was great and his mother was great. And he conquered these people and conquered that people. And this was written by his court poet. Ashoka's inscriptions always begin with, thus speaks Devanam Appiah Appiah Darshi. Thus speaks the beloved of the gods, the one of beautiful Mian. And you can see that his vocabulary is not very polished. He's trying to speak to the people in his own words. It's so remarkable. That's so interesting. And the parallels, always the parallels with

other places in the morian let's just go back to war elephants at the moment and now anirudh i know that in the morian literature and the literature from those periods even if it's magasinese and salucids who's in the court of chandra gripta writing doesn't talk too much about elephants but do they tell us anything do they for instance tell us about interesting ways in which the morians caught elephants or how they were trained or anything like that so at this point we come to possibly the most famous quote-unquote secular ancient indian text adyarthashastra and now according to the most latest research by this chap called mark mcclish who's written a lot about the compositional history of the text it has a history that might go back to pre-maurian

periods so the point of time where all these states are basically all fighting like cats and dogs to overpower each other, especially Magadha. And here's the really fascinating thing. In the earliest layer of this text, it seems like basically a secular administration in the modern sense. A absolutely state-controlled economy

where you have positions like, you know, superintendent of elephants, superintendent of cavalry. And then there's no nonsense about how in the judicial system, the Brahmins must be treated best, you know, and the Brahmins, if a Brahmin murders someone, then he gets away with a fine. Whereas if an untouchable person murders someone, then he must be executed on the spot. There's nothing of that sort. So very clearly, I think the earliest layer of the Atashasa shows us that you have a point of time where states are just doing what is most efficient to overpower each other and they don't give a crap about religion it's all about getting their hands on resources but later on of course the artha shastra is reworked by brahmin scholars

and they add all this religious stuff all these things that supposedly link the text to a supposed guru of chandra gupta maria i wish i had time to get into that right now but let's stay on point um so the artha shastra gives us some really fascinating information about how these early of chandragupta maria i wish i had time to get into that right now but let's stay on point um so the artha shastra gives us some really fascinating information about how these early states might have gone about capturing boar elephants so basically what you do is that you have a massive pit excavated with a little bit of land in the center and you put a female elephant there and then you build a bridge so any wandering tusker basically makes a beeline to the female elephant and once they have done that you pull down the bridge so the elephant can't jump out And then you build a bridge. So any wandering tusker basically makes a beeline to the female elephant.

And once they have done that, you pull down the bridge so the elephant can't jump out. And then you basically get a bunch of trained elephants to go in and like wrestle it into submission. And then you tie up the elephant in the strongest chains you can to this massive like stake that's driven into the ground so it can't move. And then you just starve it until it's absolutely exhausted. While constantly beating it with your own own domesticated elephants of course and then slowly when the elephant spirit is completely broken you start to train it and you train it of course using both the carrot and the stick as you were so india seems to have been the originator of this this tool called the ankusha which is basically the elephant goad imagine a pointed stick but just next to the point there's a little

kind of u-shaped spike as well so basically what you do with the pointed bit is that you poke the elephant at the base of its skull and with the little curved hook you basically drive it into the elephant's temporal glands which are near its ears to kind of pull it back. The life of an early Indian war elephant was profoundly painful. The Arthashastra also mentions different grades of war elephants. So it talks about where the best war elephants can be obtained. It talks about how they can be trained and various ways in which they can be deployed in battle. So elephants that were in the state of must, which is basically this the state of like extreme sexual excitement were also used in battle. And you can imagine how risky that would have been for the

Mahout and for anybody who happened to be in front of a beast like that but even those beasts would be controlled by using the ankusha so you you would have to be a really foolhardy guy to be sitting on top of a mad elephant like that and basically trying to guide it with this goad and like basically cajole it into attacking whatever was in front the other shastra is full of some really fascinating information we're also told that the elephants were fed a diet of grass and rice mixed with ghee and meat. So the way that Thomas Trotman puts it is that there's a kind of energy budget, as it were, to give the elephant this highly processed food to make sure that it's as fit for combat

as possible. And already from this very early time, you start to see the emergence of a class of people, the Mahouts, who are going to be riding and basically bond with these elephants. And who we are told would basically push these balls of food down its throat and leave their hand in the elephant's mouth. So the elephant would get used to their taste and to their smell. These are really what I think are the origins of what we call an elephant science, as it were. I talked a little earlier about how by the medieval period the king and the elephant are seen as basically almost interrelated right by the medieval period you see kings writing

these texts called gajashastras so we talked about the arthashastra earlier now your gajashastras are basically compendia of knowledge on elephants so how do you treat elephant diseases what kind of marks indicate that an elephant is auspicious or good at fighting and you see kings very deliberately trying to compose these texts so what is seen the Arthashas as the very earliest origins of this kind of science of elephant training that in India continued to evolve over the course of thousands of years and seems to survive in perhaps a less organized and less military form but still survives in some ways today. That science of elephant training is about Anurudh. So the people that are needed to create a war elephant,

and it's very inhumane and brutal. You've got the hunter, from what you were saying, and you have the mahouts, the driver. Were there other people that were needed? So you need a whole bunch of people to take care of an elephant. It's not an easy job. And most interestingly, earlier Indian states don't

seem to have captured elephant calves so they would very deliberately set out to capture only fully grown female elephants or male elephants you would have needed a whole bunch of people to for example build the pen that was used to capture these creatures you need a whole bunch of people to basically act as drummers and beaters through the forest to terrify them and like get them to move closer and closer towards the pit and then once you capture them how do you get your hands on all the stuff that's required to feed these creatures you need to have a very large workforce that's literally its entire job is to just go out and forage on behalf of your elephants and which is why i said kingdoms seem to be more successful because kingdoms have

this large body of people who can be directed to do specifically this task by a central authority whereas in say a republic where you know you have a whole bunch of seniors who are taking this decision where perhaps everything is organized according to clans and not according to any kind of central authority you're not capable of getting the same number of elephants so that's a good point that you brought up you need to have a mobile centralized workforce if you're going to have elephants. That's very interesting when we get into the whole logistics side of this. If we think of war elephants in the military side of things, an army on the march with war elephants, war elephants must slow it down considerably. And when we consider the huge size of India,

ancient India, let's say the Mauryas and the Mauryan expansion, how far it goes. If these armies had a lot of elephants in them, that must have been really slow progress. Yeah, I wish we knew more about ancient Indian campaigns to kind of understand what the rationale was behind getting all these elephants along. We have some hints from the Arthashastra though. Though you point out and i think accurately that you know elephants aren't exactly the fastest animals they also can help increase the mobility of an army counterintuitively so if you're crossing a river for example you can have a whole line of elephants breaking the flow of the river and thus making it easier for you guys to get across let's say you're facing really difficult terrain through a forest you can have your elephants break away through the forest in fact this is a really fascinating example i came across from

from much later of course this is during the haptolite invasions of india in roughly the fifth sixth centuries ce where there seems to have been a kind of pincer attack against a position where kings came from both i think eastern india and western india if i recall correctly and basically the eastern indian king talks about how the hills of the forest resounded with the sound of trees cracking under the feet and the trunks of his elephants. So here you have elephants apparently being used to build a route, as it were. So perhaps that was considered to be a sufficient justification for using elephants. Or then again, we don't know whether there were armies that didn't bother to use elephants at all and basically sacrifice

that potential striking power in favor of increased mobility it's kind of difficult to say but if you look at much later periods for example if you look at extremely mobile armies such as the turks when they invade india in the early 11th century while they don't have elephants when they start out they very rapidly start to use elephants there's this really fascinating example of this chap called Mehmood of Ghazni. I'm not sure if you've heard the name, but he's the guy who basically starts the very earliest Turkic raids into northern India. And he and his father make it a habit to basically use their Turkish cavalry archers to attack war elephants where they're weak. So you see them instructing their troops to basically fire at elephants exposed feet for example to infuriate the creatures but later on you see

mahmud of ghazni using elephants in central asia to scare his khwarezmian enemies and you see him using an elephant to announce which of his sons is going to succeed him on the throne and you also see him using elephants to batter down the gates of enemy cities so there seems to have been some kind of trade-off there. We're not sure of like what went into it because we don't have detailed accounts of Indian campaigns, but elephants are not as unwieldy

and as useless on the battlefield and in marching orders as we might like to think. Fair enough. Yeah, it sounds like they actually conserve a variety of different purposes from bashing down gates

to possibly helping reduce the flow of fast-flowing rivers to allow an army to cross although a good example of how that does not work is perdicus in 320 bc and then i'll anyways moving on a really interesting part of the war elephant is of course the rider the mahout do our ancient sources tell us anything about who these figures were and like perhaps what part of society they came from do we know anything about the drivers of these elephants i honestly wish we did from

what we can tell from various literary references and all that it seems that mahouts had a close relationship with their king for example so perhaps they were considered in in some sense the closest companions of the king right because the king's life and success in battle depended on him having a highly trained mahout did perhaps indian princes have favored mahouts assigned to them at birth they grew up with these mahouts did the families of mahouts basically live in servitude to royal families across generations where they would transmit this knowledge across generations we don't know we don't know what their backgrounds were we don't know like what their relationship to the king and to the royal family really was and of course we don't know to what extent are all these gajah

shastras and all that are being composed by kings really written by the chief mahouts i wish we we had enough evidence to really say for sure but sadly we do not but by any stretch of the imagination the indian mahout was probably one of the most remarkable figures of ancient military history because not only do these guys basically invent a totally new way of doing war in northeastern india these guys are also fighting in battlefields as far away as the mediterranean and they are in many ways one of the earliest globalized mercenaries that we know of which again is very remarkable that we don't know much about these guys and like what they came from and why they went out so far away from home in search of what were they getting. I mean, that is extraordinary, Anirudh. And I guess that brings us into the next point that these elephants, particularly in the Mauryan period, they're not just used by Indian

militaries and the Mahouts, but they're also used in diplomatic agreements, big diplomatic agreements with powers to the west. So I think I mentioned a little earlier about how Sir Lucas and Chandragupta Maurya happened to clash on the Indus River. And one consequence of that seems to have been that Sir Lucas got his hands on Indian war elephants. And we also know from some records that during the reign of Chandragupta's son Bu sara there also seems to have been a celibate ambassador who visited india to get his hands on elephants and even much later on i think during the reign of antiochus the third or something by which time the mauryan empire was very much in decline supposedly an indian king called sobhagasenos which would be probably

sobhagasena in an indian language supposedly agreed to give Antiochus a whole bunch of elephants as well so they seem to have been used as a diplomatic tool by Indians right because it seems to me that for all intents and purposes the the extent of the Hellenistic world ended at the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and those guys seem to have performed role of a kind of trading hub this meeting point of east and west as it were where this kind of military manpower and material would be exchanged between the Seljukid and the modern worlds. And elephants seem to have been one of the most important elements of that exchange. Absolutely. No, absolutely. We do hear the Greco-Bakshan Kingdom, another fascinating kingdom. I'm sure I'll do a podcast on it in the

future. We hear of war elephants there, Indian war elephants. So it is interesting how, once again, this kingdom in modern-day Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, that area seems to be in this central hub and the center of Bactria for this trade, isn't it? And once again, as you said earlier, it really emphasizes how war elephants were this global military unit, the war elephants in this mahout, which you can see varying from eastern India all the way to the Mediterranean. Absolutely extraordinary in itself. I believe that one of the earlier and most successful Greco-Bactrian kings,

I think Demetrius I, in his coins, he actually has an elephant headdress, which is so fascinating that he chooses to represent the fact that he's a successful military leader by using an elephant, whether this means that he fought against war elephants or incorporated war elephants into his army i'm not really sure what do you think it means well interesting with demetrius is the epithet i think it is which is aniketos yes the invincible yes so what is interesting about demetrius is that there used to be thought that he was the man who really launched a lot of greco

batran invasion an invasion into the ganges river, then continued by one of his successors, perhaps it was Menander, perhaps his son, which perhaps goes deep into what was the decaying Mauryan Empire and the emergence of the Shungan Empire and perhaps all the way to Pataliputra. We don't know, that's debated. Let's go back to yourself. And actually I mentioned there Pataliputra

because that is somewhere I'd like us to go back to, this capital of the Mauryans, because this is the epicenter of the Mauryans. We know war elephants, they seem to be pretty prominent with the Mauryans, although perhaps the chariots are more eminent. Do we have any evidence for Pataliputra, for like a royal elephant stable into how the elephants were perhaps maintained by the kings? Well, see the biggest problem when it comes to pataliputra is that think about it it's a amazingly ancient city it's more than 2500 years old continues to be inhabited today unfortunately the core of ancient pataliputra is also the core of modern day patna where hundreds of thousands

of people continue to live and lead lives so unless we are somehow able to dig deep into pataliputra or perhaps build a metro in pataliputra, just like the Rome Metro project tends to keep unearthing all these fascinating remains. I don't know when we are going to know more about the location of the palace at Pataliputra and so on. We do know from excavations on its outskirts that we seem to have discovered a wooden palisade wall we've discovered a hall with i think 80 pillars or so some evidence of like canals and all which might have been royal palaces or a buddhist monastery we really don't know this is the really difficult part about indian archaeology is that a lot of major historic indian cities continue to be major indian cities today so it's very difficult to do archaeology and really figure out the layout of these cities and all that less important cities have kind of been excavated so if you look at raja griha which used to be the

the magadhan capital before the rise of the mauryas we do have some idea of like the shape of the city and the way it was laid out but again i'm not really sure about whether the royal elephant stable survives you have to keep in mind that building in stone is is not something that was very often done in like a secular context right so even the most splendid medieval palaces were very often just built out of like brick or wood or tamped earth so they very often just do not survive and elephant stables will probably have been built out of wood and there's no reason to assume that they would have survived all of this time unfortunately fair enough well let's move on from the mauryas then and this is where my history of india gets even more fuzzy after mauryas in the north before we go on to the south i think the shunga empire starts to emerge do we see the war elephant retain its importance into this next period with the

shungas certainly there's a very famous carving from a major buddhist stupa i'm kind of getting my stupas mixed up i'm not i think it's at sanchi i'm not totally sure but there's this really splendid panel which is called the war over the buddha's relics supposedly after the death of the buddha you had these north indian kings basically going against each other to try and grab a bit of bud's remains to put them into a stupa to basically show off how pious they were. And these carvings, of course, are actually made much, much later. These carvings were probably made during the Shanga period, during the Satavahana, and perhaps even the Shaka period, the Indo-Scythians.

And it's very interesting that they show elephants in martial poses. So I think it's quite evident that the elephant elephants in martial poses so i think it's quite evident that the elephant did indeed continue to be used and my personal theory is that the elephant actually became even more useful the utility of the elephant actually grows in the centuries after that though again so we're kind of handicapped by the lack of archaeological and textual evidence so we can't say for sure but i don't think there's any reason to assume that the use of the war elephant decline and like i said the heyday of the war elephant lay much ahead of that and nearly half a millennium after the shungas is when you see the royal war elephant

really emerging into a class of its own well there you go there you go once again it harkens back to that it evolves as antiquity goes on and down into the medieval period gets more and more important now just for wrapping up we've talked a lot about North India. We can't help it. We've been talking about the Hellenistic period because it's been so important with the war elephant trade and it going west into the Mediterranean sphere in the Near East. But Anirudh, if we could head south into southern India now. You mentioned earlier some of the literature we have from southern India, which seems to give us a bit of information about the war elephants. of the literature we have from southern india which seems to give us a bit of information about the war elephants i mean because when do we start hearing about war elephants emerging in these

southern indian kingdoms in south india so once again like with north india it's difficult to be entirely sure what is interesting is that in the very earliest sangam period text so the sangams are basically these um these poetic gatherings that happened in the deep south. So especially in the Tamil country, which is basically, if you imagine India as an ice cream cone, then the Tamil country is the part that you eat the last. So they're the very bottom of the subcontinent and they're very deeply integrated into the networks of the Indian Ocean world. So whereas in North India, it seems that urbanization was kind of propelled by kingship, by agriculture. It seems that urbanization in South India was kind of propelled by international trade. And you see these local chiefs who basically become rich enough to declare themselves kings, who call together these large numbers of poets. And these guys basically sit together and like bring together poetry across

very, very diverse themes. And very often when they talk about the hill or basically the hilly regions of the tamil country they refer to elephants basically as wild animals and it seems that young men basically hunted elephants as a sign of martial prowess which is so very clearly at this time the this war elephant technology as it were hadn't reached the tamil country and like the dating of the sangam period is kind of controversial but the general consensus seems to be that it's sometime between the second century BCE to the second century CE so probably after we're talking about the post-Maharian period but by the fifth sixth century or so Tamil kingdoms are definitely using war elephants we know this because you start to see the events of kingdoms which are making land grants to temples. And in those very often you see mentions of elephants.

Just as in North India, you had these legends of the Buddha being thrown before these mad elephants. You start to see Shaiva saints, basically worshippers of Shiva, supposedly being thrown to mad war elephants. And of course, because of their amazing religious powers, taming these fearsome creatures. So it's difficult to be totally sure but like you said you know like we tend to think a lot about north india right but i kind of feel like that's a result of trying to look at north in the same time that we look at the western world whereas um the indian subcontinent just like europe does has these great rhythms where one geopolitical region is more or less important and for me the medieval period from

roughly 600 to 1100 is the most fascinating because that's when south india really emerges into its own and you see south indian empire is actually invading the north and being the dominant power of the subcontinent we see south indian architectural styles influencing the rest of the subcontinent and stuff like that and then you have this period after the delhi sultanate where once again the north temporarily dominates and this kind of continues into the mughal period until the mughals seem to have conquered the entire subcontinent but then once again by the 18th century see the south rising once again with the marathas uh so there's this decan polity that basically overthrow the mughals and continue to dominate most of subcontinent and so there's these cycles you know

unfortunately today that cycle seems to have been like it's basically held in stasis because of the fact that we're a democratic nation and the largest population of north india if you look at the economy south india is once again like far more developed than north india is so it's so interesting to me to see how these great tides of this enormous subcontinent like continuing uh over thousands of years and they'll probably continue uh long after we're gone as well absolutely global comparisons are are remarkable as well with that on there and i do find it very interesting how of course the the crux of our interview today is about ancient indian war elephants in ancient indian time where i said as you said we focus more on north india but this period that i know that you're personally very very interested in this 600 to 900

ad period that's remarkable in itself, how this is when we really start seeing South India come to the fore and even go so far as become dominant over many places in Northern India. Really, and what is most interesting to me is that once again, you see a kind of repetition of these patterns of global exchange. Whereas this time, instead of India being the source

of war elephants to the rest of the world, at this point of time, Indian polities seem to become really interested in cavalry because they've figured out how to get elephants for themselves. Now they're interested in cavalry. So this polity in the Deccan,

which I have a particular fascination for, it's called the Rashtrakuta Empire. Now, I don't know if you've, have you visited India, Tristan? I have not. I've flown over it, but I've never visited. In time, I will. If you've have you have you visited india tristan i have not i've flown over it but i've never visited in time i will if you do um you should absolutely visit the site called elora which is in modern maharashtra in elora in the 8th 9th centuries the rashtrakutas made something

which i think really should be considered a wonder of the world it's this gigantic temple about the size of a football field about four-fifths the height of the leaning tower of pisa and it's this gigantic temple about the size of a football field about four-fifths the height of the leaning tower of pisa and it's a single monolith it is carved from the top down from this gigantic cliff side and it was done over the course of about 10-15 years from what we know so you really have to think about the logistical capabilities of a state that that does something like that then we have some golden coins from the Rashtrakuta period where the king is depicted. So just as we talked about Demetrius I from Bactria depicting himself with an elephant headdress,

so associating himself with the martial capabilities of an elephant, this Deccan king, who's called Govinda III, is shown sitting on a horse. And it's a golden coin with a script that seems to be inspired by Arabic. So clearly, just as Demetrius was importing war elephants and using elephants to signal that he's invincible aniketos as you said govinda the third is using golden coins to get horses from arabia he's sworn riding a horse and the inscription on the coin says apratihata which means invincible so again like a strange parallel he seems to have been using cavalry amazing and then once then once again, the trade,

not just the overland trade with Dmitry I in Bactria, overland trade with the Hindukush, but also he said the maritime trade with the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Amazing. Last thing, Anirudh,

before we all wrap this up, going to keep back to war elephants. We've talked about Northern India. We talked about Northwest, Northeast. We talked a bit about Southern India just then. And of course, we've talked about those Hellenistic kingdoms one last area which i'd like to ask what we do know about ancient war elephants in this part of the world is that island to the east of india of south india especially sri lanka what do we know about war elephants in sri lanka in

ancient history so basically sri lanka is to the Tamil country what England is to France. They have this extremely tumultuous relationship where they're constantly trying to invade each other and to this day have a fair bit of animosity towards each other. Fortunately, they haven't fought in any world wars to kind of improve their relationship together. But Sri Lanka, again, it's kind of difficult to say. It's further south of the Tamil country. So I think it's reasonable to assume that war elephants arrived there a little later.

But once again, by roughly the 7th century or so, we have these Buddhist records of a Sri Lankan prince who supposedly wasn't allowed to take his throne and so goes and becomes basically one of the clients of a Pallava king in the Tamil country. They ride on elephants together and the Pallava king gives him elephants and he takes his army of elephants back and like goes and like, you know, overpowers his foes and so on. So once again, it's kind of difficult to say for sure, but definitely by the 7th century or so, the war elephant seems to have been universal in Indian battlefields. And of course, we won't have time to get into this today.

Maybe we can do it some other time. Or if you do it with a Southeast Asian expert, I'd be delighted to listen to it. But this also seems to be after the time that the war elephant emerges into a class of its own in Southeast Asia. Well, let's go into that quickly now. So is that another thing we'd be talking about how Indian war elephants, we see them in India, and we see them also going west. But we also see them at this time going east into southeast asia yeah so um the movement of elephants into southeast asia is it's kind of different the dynamics a little different from its relationship with the western world because unlike the mediterranean elephants are native to southeast asia so you don't need to import them from india so the main limiting

factor seems to have been the existence of monarchies that were capable of kind of mobilizing the resource to get war elephants that we talked about so I think if you look at Cambodia for example in the early centuries you don't really see that much of like statehood but like by the 5th 6th century you see the emergence of Funan then Chenla and then eventually Angkor and by then the war elephant has really seemed to have become a major presence on Southeast Asian battlefields interestingly enough one of the really interesting things about Thomas Trotman's book Elephants and Kings is that he has a diagram of Yuhar which seems to have been this military formation that was first thought of in India but now the only way we know how

Yuhars might have looked is through illustrations made in ayutthaya in early modern thailand and we also have a much better sense of how war elephants were actually used in combat thanks to the better state of preservation in southeast asia than we do in india itself so again it's it's kind of interesting how because the lack of evidence from india you kind of have to peer through this this foggy lens that that is established by looking at other kingdoms instead of looking backwards. Well, I'll have to get another podcast lined up for elephants in Southeast Asia. Sounds like another amazing topic. I shan't mention the Trung sisters.

Anirudh, this has been a fantastic hour of chatting about Indian war elephants and everything in between. Thank you so much for coming on the show. My pleasure. you