Use Of Elephant in War

Persians used war elephants at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC. The battle raged between king Alexander the Great of Macedon and king Darius III of Persia. The Persians had 15 Indian-trained war elephants, which were placed at the centre of the Persian line, and they made such an impression on the Macedonian troops that Alexander felt the need to sacrifice to the God of Fear the night before the battle. Despite this the Persians lost the battle, relinquishing the Achaemenid Persian empire to Alexander. Elephants were later used by the Sassanids under a special chief, known as the Zend−hapet, or "Commander of the Indians," as they were from India.

History

Under the Achaemenids

The Persians are known to have used fifteen war elephants at Gaugamela, but some people^{[citation needed]} claim that they had been used previously in the Greek campaign of king Xerxes I of Persia, and even further back at the time of Darius the Great at the Indus, the Danube and against the Scythians in 512BC. Neither Xenophon nor Herodotus mention war elephants in their accounts of these earlier campaigns.

Under the Sassanids

Julian's campaign

Indian styled elephant with howdah

In 363 AD Julian the Apostate marshaled an army of 90,000 Roman troops to invade the Sassanid Territory with the intention of ravaging the Imperial capital of Ctesiphon. The Persian Shah, Shapur II, was astute enough a tactician to realize his soldiers' only chance of challenging the well-trained and better-equipped Romans was a clandestine attack. While the Romans were encamped outside the walls of the capital, the Persians launched a surprise assault onto the unsuspecting army leading with a force of heavy infantry, cataphracts and elephants. Caught unaware, the Roman soldiers fought valiantly but eventually ended up losing the battle.

During the melee, Julian foolishly charged into the conflict without his armour and was injured by an arrow. Although initially surviving, he later succumbed to the injury and died.

Belisarius remarks on Sassanid troops:

“

Right for you to despise them. For their whole infantry is nothing more than a crowd of pitiable peasants who come into battle for no other purpose than to dig through walls ... and in general to serve the soldiers. For this reason they have no weapons at all with which they might trouble their opponents, and they only hold before themselves those enormous shields and huge elephants.

”

Armenian wars

The most famous was the Battle of Avarayr (Armenian: Ավարայրի ճակատամարտ) in 451 CE, where Armenian rebels led by Vartan Mamikonian led an army of 66,000 men to gain independence from the Sassanids under Yazdegerd II, who opposed them with forces including war elephants.

Despite their victory over the rebels and the death of their leadership (including Vartan Mamikonian), Yazdegerd was generous and gave the Armenians their religious freedom.

Ghaznavid war elephants

Persians fighting elephants

In 1739, Nader Shah of Persia invaded India and led an army to their capital , Delhi but on the way he was halted by the Mughul Indian ruler Muhammad Shah and his huge army, it greatly outnumbered the Persian army. The Indians also had war elephants with them, they had blades on their tusks which they were taught to use against the enemy. Nader shah sent his pots of oil to the front lines where the goats horns were ordered to be set on fire. The goats charged at the elephants who panicked and turned around killing thousands of Indian troops just like at the battle of al-Qādisiyyah, they were proved to be "double edged weapons".

Origin and training

The elephant's thick hide protects it from injury. The high riding position gave the rider a good view but made him a visible target.

The elephants were hired as mercenary troops as well as their riders. They were from the Indian territories under Persian rule. Some historians say that some were actually from Iran itself. They were called Syrian Elephant. However, this is highly unlikely as most historians and sources do not say this is correct.

All the times Persians used war elephants they were trained by their rider called a mahout, who would also ride the elephant into battle as well. The mahout would be from Indian origin and so were the archers. Training elephants was a difficult job. They would be hard to maintain because they ate so much food and water. Also they were hard to march with as huge paths needed to be cut in order for elephants to march through. Another reason was that they were expensive to hire and sometimes would panic if they were under heavy fire from spears and arrows. Thousands of them lived in the elephant farms^{[citation needed]}. Many were kept in the shah's menagerie the most famous of which was Khosrau II where he kept a "thousand white elephants."

Weapons

Persian elephants were from Indian origin and were probably armed with Indian styled weapons. The men(excluding the driver) sat in a large tower from which troops would fight. The elephant itself would normally be armed with thin plate armour (the Sassanids used chain mail as well as thin plate armour)and would bear a large crenelated wooden howdah on its back^[1]. The troops would be armed with bow and arrows and javelin. The sworn enemy of the Sassanids, the Eastern Roman empire, were terrified by the huge beasts, making them very effective in battle. When they were used at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah, they came to be known as "double edged weapons". King ( shah ) Yazdgerd III attempted to use war elephants to fight off Arab invaders, however his elephants got sand in their eyes and panicked. They turned around and ran amok, killing their own troops.

Crushing by elephant

Louis Rousselet described this execution in "Le Tour du Monde" in 1868.

(Persian: زير پى ِپيل افكندن; literally "casting beneath an elephant's feet")

Those people that were traitors to the army, enemies of the empire and criminals were crushed by the elephants this way and executed in the age of Sassanids they also used this method of execution for training for battle.

In popular culture

• In the PC strategy game Age of Empires II the Persians' special unit is the war elephant.
• In the PC strategy game expansion pack Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots the Persians get two special unit lines, one of which is the war elephant, which it shares with India.
• In the strategy game Rome: Total War the Parthians use war elephants. In the expansion Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion the Sassanids can use war elephants as well, and in Rome Total War: Alexander the Achaemenid Persians also have them.
• Shatranj (Persian chess) - which Modern chess has gradually developed from it, same as Indian chess includes the war elephant with the name (fil),meaning elephant in Persian as the bishop

ZOO

The predecessor of the zoological garden is the menagerie, which has a long history from the ancient world to modern times. The oldest known zoological collection was revealed during excavations at Hierakonpolis, Egypt in 2009, of a ca. 3500 B.C. menagerie. The exotic animals included hippos, hartebeest, elephants, baboons and wildcats.[8] In the 2nd century BCE, the Chinese Empress Tanki had a "house of deer" built, and King Wen of Zhou kept a 1,500-acre (6.1 km2) zoo called Ling-Yu, or the Garden of Intelligence. Other well-known collectors of animals included King Solomon of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, Kings Semirami and Ashurbanipal of Assyria, and King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylonia.[2] By the 4th century BCE, zoos existed in most of the Greek city states; Alexander the Great is known to have sent animals that he found on his military expeditions back to Greece. The Roman emperors kept private collections of animals for study or for use in the arena,[2] the latter faring notoriously poorly. The 19th-century historian W.E.H. Lecky wrote of the Roman games, first held in 366 BCE:
At one time, a bear and a bull, chained together, rolled in fierce combat across the sand ... Four hundred bears were killed in a single day under Caligula ... Under Nero, four hundred tigers fought with bulls and elephants. In a single day, at the dedication of the Colosseum by Titus, five thousand animals perished. Under Trajan ... lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, giraffes, bulls, stags, even crocodiles and serpents were employed to give novelty to the spectacle ..

Medieval England
Henry I of England kept a collection of animals at his palace in Woodstock, which reportedly included lions, leopards, and camels. The most prominent collection in medieval England was in the Tower of London, created as early as 1204 by King John I. Henry III received a wedding gift in 1235 of three leopards from Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and in 1264, the animals were moved to the Bulwark, renamed the Lion Tower, near the main western entrance of the Tower. It was opened to the public during the reign of Elizabeth I in the 16th century. During the 18th century, the price of admission was three half-pence, or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions. The animals were moved to the London Zoo when it opened.
Modern era
Further information: List of zoos

The Versailles menagerie during the reign of Louis XIV in the 17th century
The oldest existing zoo, the Vienna Zoo in Austria, evolved from the Imperial Menagerie at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, an aristocratic menagerie founded in 1752 by the Habsburg monarchy, which was opened to the public in 1765. In 1775, a zoo was founded in Madrid, and in 1795, the zoo inside the Jardin des Plantes in Paris was founded by Jacques-Henri Bernardin, with animals from the royal menagerie at Versailles, primarily for scientific research and education. The Kazan Zoo, the first zoo in Russia was founded in 1806 by the Professor of Kazan State University Karl Fuchs. The Zoological Society of London, founded in 1826 by Stamford Raffles, adopted the idea of the Paris zoo when they established the London Zoo in Regent's Park in 1828, which opened to paying visitors in 1847. The first zoological garden in Australia was Melbourne Zoo in 1860. In the same year, Central Park Zoo, the first public zoo in the United States, opened in New York, although in 1859, the Philadelphia Zoological Society had made an effort to establish a zoo, but delayed opening it until 1874 because of the American Civil War.

London Zoo, 1835.
In 1907, the German entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck founded the Tierpark Hagenbeck in Stellingen, now a quarter of Hamburg. It is known for being the first zoo to use open enclosures surrounded by moats, rather than barred cages, to better approximate animals' natural environments.
When ecology emerged as a matter of public interest in the 1970s, a few zoos began to consider making conservation their central role, with Gerald Durrell of the Jersey Zoo, George Rabb of Brookfield Zoo, and William Conway of the Bronx Zoo (Wildlife Conservation Society) leading the discussion. From then on, zoo professionals became increasingly aware of the need to engage themselves in conservation programs, and the American Zoo Association soon said that conservation was its highest priority. Because they wanted to stress conservation issues, many large zoos stopped the practice of having animals perform tricks for visitors. The Detroit Zoo, for example, stopped its elephant show in 1969, and its chimpanzee show in 1983, acknowledging that the trainers had probably abused the animals to get them to perform.[14]
[edit] Human exhibits

Ota Benga, a human exhibit in New York, 1906
Further information: Human zoos, Scientific racism, and Social Darwinism
Human beings were sometimes displayed in cages along with non-human animals, supposedly to illustrate the differences between people of European and non-European origin. In September 1906, William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo in New York—with the agreement of Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society—had Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy, displayed in a cage with the chimpanzees, then with an orangutan named Dohong, and a parrot. The exhibit was intended as an example of the "missing link" between the orangutan and white man. It triggered protests from the city's clergymen, but the public reportedly flocked to see it

Human beings were also displayed in cages during the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, and as late as 1958 in a "Congolese village" display at Expo '58 in Brussels.