Elephant II

Oliver East’s commemoration of Maharajah the Indian Elephant’s historic journey from Edinburgh to Manchester in 1872 has stimulated a lot of interest in elephants amongst tweeters and blog contributors. Yesterday I looked at some examples of elephants in the ancient world undertaking even longer journeys than the one that Oliver is re-enacting. The time taken by elephants to cover the distance was longer in the ancient world because they did not have the benefit of walking over surfaced roads like the ones that Maharajah followed with his keeper, Lorenzo Lawrence, and it is to be hoped that Oliver doesn’t face the sort of opposition that Hannibal and his army faced from the locals when he was crossing the Alps. In this respect the elephants in Hannibal’s army proved to be a great asset because the mountain tribesmen had never seen elephants before and were intimidated by their unfamiliar appearance, their size, the noise they made and their smell.

Terracotta figurine of Galatian in Manchester Museum collection.

More often than not they were as much a problem for their own side as the enemy, but in some circumstances elephants proved to be an extremely dangerous weapon of war but  One of the best examples of the debilitating psychological impact elephants had on the enemy on the battlefield in the ancient world is the ‘Elephant Victory’.  The Seleucids deployed sixteen elephants against an army of Galatians in Asia Minor in 275 BC. The Galatian warriors and their horses were terrified by the elephants. Their chariots and cavalry were reduced to chaos when their horses bolted. The Galatian infantry were trampled. The Seleucid king Antiochus I took the title Soter or Saviour because of this victory. He alone had proved equal to the challenge of defeating the Galatians. Tellingly, the victory monument took the form of an elephant because really it had been thanks to the elephants that the Galatians had been defeated, not the fighting skills of Antiochus’s men. The surviving Galatians were settled by a magnanimous Antiochus in central Anatolia where they gave their name to the place: Galatia. St Paul’s letters or epistles to the Galatians were addressed to the descendants of Antiochus’s former enemies. Who would have thought that but for elephants we might not have had an important component of New Testament Christian theology.

Gruesome fate: Galatian  roughly handled by an elephant

Another example of a military victory gained with the help of elephants is the battle of Heraclea. In 280 BC King Pyrrhus of Epirus in northern Greece crossed the Adriatic sea to fight the Romans in Italy on behalf of the city of Tarentum. The Tarentines  were Greeks who had settled in southern Italy and were now coming under pressure from the expanding Roman Republic. Pyrrhus landed with a Hellenistic army comprising 20,000 infantry, 3000 cavalry and 20 elephants. The Romans attacked Pyrrhus before he could receive any reinforcements . The advantage in the battle is said to have swung backwards and forwards seven times before Pyrrhus gave the order for the elephants to attack:

                                                 ‘as the Romans began to be driven back by the elephants and their horses, before they could get near the beasts, started to panic and bolt, Pyrrhus seized his opportunity: as the Romans faltered, he launched a charge with his Thessalian cavalry and routed the enemy with great slaughter.’

Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Books)

Despite his victory Pyrrhus had lost 4,000 of his best troops and this has given rise to the term ‘Pyrrhic victory’ meaning a victory that has been gained at great cost.

One of Pyrrhus’ elephants with calf on a southern IIalian plate

In 279 BC Pyrrhus, now reinforced by the Samnites and various other hill-tribes of southern and central Italy, fought the Roman legions again at the battle of Ausculum. Depending on which ancient historian you follow this was a one or a two day battle. At first heavily wooded ground on the edge of the swiftly flowing river caused Pyrrhus and his allies considerable difficulty. The next day at first light Pyrrhus sent troops to occupy the difficult ground, posted contingents of archers and slingers in the spaces between the elephants and made his attack. It was a fiercely contested battle until the elephants charged:

                                                           ‘Against this even the Romans’courage was of little avail: they felt as they might have done before the rush of a tidal wave or the shock of an earthquake, that it was better to give way than to stand their ground to no purpose, and suffer a terrible fate without the least advantage.’

Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Books)

Pyrrhus’ elephants rout the Romans at the battle of Heraclea 280 BC. Artistic license has run riot here.

Another account of the battle says the Romans deployed ‘anti-elephant’ wagons complete with burning brands and scythes as a counter measure to deal with the elephants but they were a failure. The Romans are recorded as having lost 6,000 men, Pyrrhus 3,505. Another Pyrrhic victory. On being congratulated on his success, Pyrrhus is said to have remarked ‘One more victory like that over the Romans will destroy us completely!’

Roman Republican currency bar decorated with a depiction of an elephant, presumably one of Pyrrhus’ beasts.

Pyrrhus accepted an invitation to intervene in Sicily as a champion of the Greeks against the Carthaginians. He enjoyed tremendous success but in the end alienated the people he was supposed to be defending and returned back to Italy where the Romans were once again pressing his southern Italian allies. At the battle of Beneventum in 276 BC Pyrrhus deployed his elephants but they proved to be as much a weapon against their own side as the Romans and Pyrrhus was defeated. One of the elephants had a calf (presumably the very animal depicted on the plate in the image above) and when they became separated during the battle, the calf panicked and the mother went to its aid, trampling nearby friendly troops. Pyrrhus returned to Epirus with the survivors. He campaigned in Macedonia and the Peloponnese again with elephants but was killed during confused street fighting at the city of Argos. It was a sad end to one of the great heroic characters of antiquity. Fittingly, his tomb was marked with a carving of an elephant.

One of the things that makes these characters from antiquity so deeply interesting is their use of elephants. It’s hard not to think they were just as much fascinated with the animals as we are.

Fascination with elephants? Child’s toy from Cyprus in Manchester Museum

DNA and the Roman Army in Britain

Fresh from the success of confirming the identity of the skeleton in the car park in Leicester as the remains of Richard III, and hot on the heels of the documentary about Eddie Izzard’s genetic ancestry, another DNA research breakthrough was announced about 10 days ago. In The Daily  Telegraph (23rd February 2013) it was reported that up to a million Britons carry genetic signatures that are commonly found in and are likely to have their origin in Italy. The DNA marker R1b-S28 is thought to come from men who served in the Roman army.

I have to confess I am a tad sceptical about this. After all it’s not so long ago that claims were made on the basis of DNA studies that the Etruscans really were descended from people who left Lydia or western Turkey to settle in northern Italy as was claimed by some writers.  Later it was revealed that the DNA link went back much much earlier and it reflected the fact that people recolonized Europe after the last Ice Age over ten thousand years ago from warmer refuges in western Asia. Most Italians had the Asian DNA not just those living in northern Italy because they were mainly descended from a small population of ancestors who’d lived in the same refuge before the last Ice Age.

The claim in The Daily Telegraph seems to assume that all the men in the Roman army were Romans or at the very least Italian. However, detailed research on the Roman army over many years has shown that it was ethnically an extremely diverse organisation. ‘Odds and sods’ of all sorts as Mark Hassall once put it. The number of soldiers fluctuated but much of the time there were three legions numbering in total 15,000-18,000 men in Britain and at least as many auxiliaries. The auxiliaries were recruited from peoples who had been incorporated in the empire or who supplied troops under a treaty obligation. After serving for 25 years the auxiliaries received Roman citizenship. One of our best sources of information about ethnicity in the Roman Empire is epigraphy or the study of inscriptions. Gauls, Spaniards, Moors, Germans, Syrians and many other peoples are attested. For example, for a time here in Manchester the garrison of the Roman fort consisted of men from Raetia and Noricum (Switzerland and the modern Styria, Carinthia, Salzburg, and part of Austria and Bavaria in eastern central Europe). Once these men had become Roman citizens their sons would have been eligible to serve in the legions. This being so, we should expect a diverse DNA profile.

Raetians and Noricans are mentioned in an inscription on an altar from Roman Manchester displayed in the Ancient Worlds galleries

Even if we focus on the legions, historically the recruitment shifted over time from Italy to the provinces, although these men must have been the sons and grandsons of men who were Romans and Italians in the late Republic/early Empire. Later as the sons of auxiliaries awarded Roman citizenship became eligible to serve in the legions a broader genetic catchment must have had an influence.

One of the best examples we have here in the Museum’s Ancient Worlds displays of ethnicity in the Roman army is a fragmentary bronze auxiliary diploma from Ravenglass in Cumbria. This official record showed the recipient has been awarded Roman citizenship after serving the requisite number of years. We don’t know the man’s name. That bit of the diploma hasn’t survived, sadly, but we do know he came from Syria.

The Ravenglass auxiliary diploma

The date he was demobbed – in the reign of Antoninus Pius –  suggests he was recruited in the early 130s AD. In his publication of the diploma Paul Holder, who works at the Rylands Library, suggested that the most likely historical circumstance in which this man was recruited is the suppression of the Jewish revolt in 132-5 AD. Afterwards the man came back to Britain with his unit and, because his diploma was found in the North West, he must have stayed here. Like another easterner, Barates, the Palmyran who married his former slave, the British woman Regina or Queenie (her tombstone is at South Shields),  the Syrian on the Ravenglass diploma probably put down roots. Maybe he got married, had children, and ran a business in a vicus or civilian settlement attached to a fort. Could Syrian DNA be identified in the populaton of northern Britain? The numbers involved were probably not large. A cohort of Hamian archers on Hadrian’s Wall numbered 480 men. However, in the First World War Yemeni sailors settled at South Shields and married local women. 1800 years earlier Tigris boatmen had been garrisoned at Arbeia.  Just a thought.