Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Age of Myths, Gods and Empires => Topic started by: Vermis on June 29, 2016, 01:40:03 PM
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Following Cubs' popular elephant rider topic down in the fantasy board, I remembered some photos of captive and ridden african forest elephants - a similar size to the north african elephants used by Carthage - in the book The Elephant: Endangered Animal (http://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/elephant-endangered-animal/author/dan-freeman/) by Dan Freeman. I wondered if anyone else would be interested in a look. The accompanying text explains as much as I know about the situation!
Also, I deliberately kept a large file size for the photos. If it's a bit much for LAF attachments, please let me know.
Page one:
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Page two:
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Page three:
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And page four:
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Wow, very interesting!!
They're not big at all are they!
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That's the badgers!
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Small really compared to what comes to mind when you think Elephant.
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:)
I scanned these because I couldn't find many good photos online, showing forest elephants alongside humans for a size comparison; but looking up this old article gave a few terms to strengthen the google-fu. 'Gangala-na-Bodio' (with or without dashes) brings up a few different photos, at least. Even a couple of blurry videos.
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Thank you. Interesting.
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That is very interesting. Great to see the size of these elephants. I could well see them being used by the Carthaginians without tower or armor. I understand these are extinct now? I remember having read somewhere that small colonies of these elephants still exist.
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Yeah, they're endangered but I think a few still survive here and there.
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Like a lot of wildlife these days, they have one of those distribution maps where the former range is a big swathe across the continent, and the current range is a few tiny spits and spots within that.
I'll admit I don't know a lot about Carthaginians, beyond that famous crossing of the alps; but if they mounted towers on (some of) their elephants, I wonder how big or extensive they might have been. Even on bigger bulls I'd guess the image fell a little short of some of the mūmak wannabes in artistic depictions!
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Thanks- very useful. It's interesting that the riding position shown is usually on the back. Most sculpts have the riders sitting on the neck.
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There is an interesting scholarly article on the subject if Hannibal used towers on his elephants (I'll look up the reference later). The author argues that a text fragment that refers to turrets on elephants would go back to one of the Historians that followed Hannibal on his exploits. The main point is that depneding on the tactical situation elephants would have been used with or without turret. The former against cavalry to give the elephant (which is pretty small) even more of an advantage.
Lets see if I can elaborate on this a bit more, but I need to read the article again.