A couple more cool things about elephants. They’ve changed the world.
On our first world trip we traveled through much of what I remember thinking was a sort of “Flat Bread Belt.” These are places rich with different types of delicious flat breads, one of my favorite things in the world.
(Seriously, wtf does this have to do with elephants?)
The Flat Bread Belt runs from South Africa, up along the east coast of Africa, through the Middle East all the way across India, the Malay Peninsula, and into Indonesia. That’s a long way! There is a long, ancient history of trade between these Indian Ocean linked parts of the world. Most scholars would point to more relevant connections between these areas: massive cultural movements like the spread of first Hinduism, then Buddhism, then Islam, dominate from Africa to East Asia. With all this rich history it’s probably wrong to reduce this rich history down to flat bread.
(he’s lost the plot)
So let’s talk about another phenomenon which helped shape in these places, and that is what I will henceforth call, “The Pachyderm Primacy.”
(Oh ffs that is not a thing)
Ah but it is. Descendants of Western cultures don’t think much about a world shaped by elephants, because Europe and Northern Eurasia didn’t have elephants. There were wooly mammoths but we killed them all in a fit of anti-mammoth rage.
(That is simply a lie)
However mammoths disappeared, they did. And the people of the extreme Northern hemisphere no longer had pachyderms of any kind in their lives except for in stories. But people in the south of Eurasia and Africa did. The giant African elephants of Sub-Saharan Africa were too surly to domesticate.
(Good for them)
But the various species of Asian elephant were not. They were amenable to domestication. With the domestication of elephants came a few big changes. They were able to clear and till large acreages of land in a fraction of the time as the ox or water buffalo. They were also, sadly, turned into weapons of war. Entire empires relied on the war machines that were armored, domesticated elephants. From the Khmer Empire of South East Asia to the Roman Empire in the West, war elephants shaped nations. To this day, Indian fortresses and walled cities do not have long processionals leading to their entrances like many European castles. They have a quick, tight switchback just before a giant main door studded with metal spikes. Easy to let cavalry out, hard to build up speed and ram with a war elephant.
(Go on)
If you’ve ever wondered why the rook, shaped like a castle, can charge directly across the chessboard when it looks like it should be a stationary bit of defensive architecture, wonder no more. It used to be a war elephant. This is total conjecture on my part, but I’d bet that when chess came to Europe they replaced it with something more applicable to their war technology: the crenelated castle tower.
(so. You’re just making this all up.)
There was a question whether the story of Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants to attack Rome is apocryphal. But a recent study of the soil in one of the passes thought to have been used by Hannibal and his army, found ancient traces of elephant dung, churned up with the feces of thousands of other animals. This was in a pass in the Alps where a troop of circus animals had no business being.
Rome eventually repelled Hannibal, and in retaliation took over Carthage, a confederation of states that included large swaths of North Africa. They presumably took their elephants too.
Questions remain. There are no domesticated elephants in Africa today. The only modern elephants are the large unruly sub-Saharan African Elephants who fear nothing but bees. It appears that there were domesticable elephants in North Africa though, living in the Atlas Mountains. This perhaps, is where these war elephants came from. Roman circuses imported thousands of live elephants from Africa for their brutal arena games, where they were pitted against man and beast. Bread and Circuses are responsible for the decimation of the North African elephant.
So is there a link between the Flat-Bread Belt and Pachyderm Primacy?
(oh boy. here we go)
I don’t know. But it seems suspicious that from modern Italy to Indonesia you can find some form of delicious flat-bread. From Italian Pizza Bianca to Malaysian Roti in the regions where war elephants once ruled. Bread. Which is flat. As if it’s been stepped on by a giant flat footed pachyderm.
(That’s it. I’m leaving.)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-hannibal-crossed-the-alps-180963671/