Many historians believe a likely source of Hannibal's elephants could have been the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria. Drawings of elephants appear on the Tassili Frescoes in the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria, but a recent British expedition determined that the drawings predated Hannibal. Nor is there any record of the large African species being indigenous to North Africa in the time of Hannibal. Historians speculate that a few small elephants could have been brought down the Nile Valley into Egypt, or by the Red Sea, and then bred in captivity, but there is apparently no record of this. Even though the North African climate was slightly wetter then and the Sahara not quite so extensive, conditions were still not conducive to transporting hungry elephants. Ager noted that an adult male African elephant eats some 400 pounds of vegetation a day. The bigger and ill-tempered African elephants are distinguished by their larger, fan-shaped ears, flat foreheads and concave backs.īut how did Hannibal, in Carthage, on the Mediterranean in present-day Tunisia, get a troop of elephants all the way from Asia? Or from south of the Sahara, the bush habitat of the larger African species?Įlephants have a voracious appetite. It is also the reason Indian elephants are seen tramping through fictional Africa in old Tarzan movies. Indian elephants are not quite as large as the African species but much more easily trained, which is why they are favored by zoos and circuses. If he had had a choice, Hannibal would presumably have gone into battle with Indian elephants, which had been used effectively a century before in charging against the forces of Alexander the Great. they had already dwindled to the two species extant today, the Indian, or Asian, elephants and the African ones. Once there were elephants nearly everywhere, but by the time of Hannibal's march in 218 B.C. Derek Ager, a geologist, wrote an article casting doubt on all of the proposed sources of Hannibal's elephants. 6 issue of New Scientist, a British magazine. The question was raised anew in the Sept.
But no one has yet come up with a satisfactory answer: Where did Hannibal get the elephants for his heroic march across the Alps to attack the homeland of the Romans? Students of ancient climate and ecology have tried, too.
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