With the Elephants against the Persians: The Elephantry of Ancient Aethiopia

Abstract

The present article is dedicated to a quite curious phenomenon in Ancient military history, the elephant corps of African Kingdom of Meroe. Being the Southern neighbors of the Ptolemaic Egypt, the Meroites provided their own elephantry probably following the Lagid example, because the Ptolemies had begun capturing African elephants for their army in the beginning of the 3rd century BCE. Some authors (such as Shinnie 2004, Estigarribia 1982) emphasize the Meroite priority in elephant hunting and warfare (based primarily on Arrian’s testimony (Tact. 2.2) and on some archaeological finds in the temple complex of Musawwarat es Sufra), but their conclusions don’t seem convincing enough. At the same time, we have only one known (but pilifully brief) depiction of the actual Meroitic elephant corps’ combat use, which belongs to Heliodorus of Emesa, the author of “Aethiopica”. This novel (written probably in the 3rd or the 4th Century CE) contains so many authentic details concerning geography and history of ancient Aethiopia that once it was named “The Meroitic History Encyclopedia” (Berzina 1977). Indeed, it’s worth noting that Heliodorus describes the equipment and tactics of elephantry – armour, «battle towers» fastened to animals’ backs, skilled bowmen etc. – as a whole quite authentically, especially for a novel. But these war elephants he depicts can represent rather contemporary Persian (or Sasanian) ones, mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus, Julian and other Later Roman authors, than Meroitic ones. In any case, it is impossible to determine which stage of the long history of the Meroitic elephantry is depicted in “Aethiopica”.