Synopses & Reviews
Because of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizationsandmdash;such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and Chinaandmdash;kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivoryandmdash;all of them tending toward the elephantandrsquo;s extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war.
and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160; Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the westandmdash;where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquityandmdash;and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3,000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of Indiaandrsquo;s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.and#160;
Review
andldquo;With substantial and wide-ranging scholarship, Trautmann lucidly presents the elephantandrsquo;s history in India, illuminating the important role of the war elephant and its powerful links to Indian kingship. The result is a unique and original work.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;In Elephants and Kings, Trautmannandrsquo;s singular range of erudition traces the military, political, and cultural roles of royal war elephants fromand#160;their origins in ancient India across the wide region from the Mediterranean through Southeast Asia. Graceful prose, startling insights, and beautiful illustrationsand#160;mark this extraordinary fusion of political and environmental history.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Elephants may be ubiquitous across cultures of Southern Asia, but their presence has a literal and metaphorical past that may hold clues to their continued survival in these often densely populated lands. Trautmanandrsquo;s tour de force spans much of Asia, and his story stretches into the Egypt of the Ptolemeys. At its core is the story of three millennia of taming and centuries of honing this huge animal as a war machine. India emerges at the center of the story for its pioneering role in elephant taming, keeping, and its royal protection of elephant forests over two thousand years ago. No reader will ever view the animal or its human benefactors (or exploiters) again without reference to this fascinating work.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;The elephant in Asia is remembered as a royal mount, but it was more effectively used as a crucial constituent of the army, not to be replaced until many centuries later by artillery. Trautmann, drawing on his impressive and extensive scholarship, provides a unique perspective of the Indian past, analyzing the connection between kingship, the elephant in warfare, and the environment.andrdquo;and#160;
Synopsis
In this book, renowned historian of India Tom Trautmann presents an ecological history of Indian kingship in which elephants play a surprising role. Despite the fact that the economic landscape of ancient India was tied to agricultural fields, and kings depended on the taxation of farmers, they were also tied to forests because of the institution of war elephants. Given the enormous food requirements and slow maturation of elephants it was not economic to raise them from birth. Rather, they were captured as wild adults at age 20 and trained for warfare. Thus kings had to have forests containing wild live elephants and they had to protect them from hunting. This unusual form of domestication was devised in India around 1000 BC and explains the persistence of elephants in India as opposed to China where the population of Asian elephants declined precipitously due to poaching for the international ivory market. Trautmann explains the differences between India and China on the basis of their differing attitudes toward domestic animals and the persistence of use of war elephants by Indian kings. His book covers the entire span of the war elephant as a living institution; its prehistory in Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, China and the Indus Civilization; and its reign, until quite recent times, as the timber elephant, showing how the knowledge of elephants and of elephant bodies in the war elephant culture did and did not carry forward. It ends with brief consideration of the present prospects for the persistence of wild elephants under the nation-state form. In short, the book uses war elephants as a way to get at the peculiar quality of the relation of Indian kingship to forests that is so different from that of Chinese kings and contributes to such different ways of organizing the ecology.
About the Author
Thomas R. Trautmann is professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of many books, including Dravidian Kinship, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship, Aryans and British India, and India: Brief History of a Civilization.