Thomas R. Trautmann
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226264226
- eISBN:
- 9780226264530
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226264530.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Because of their enormous size, elephants have been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In the early civilizations—Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, China—kings ...
More
Because of their enormous size, elephants have been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In the early civilizations—Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, China—kings have used elephants in royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, and the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. But the kings of India, as Thomas Trautmann writes in this book, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann 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. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations over a such an expanse, he throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.Less
Because of their enormous size, elephants have been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In the early civilizations—Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, China—kings have used elephants in royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, and the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. But the kings of India, as Thomas Trautmann writes in this book, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann 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. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations over a such an expanse, he throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests.
