History
Under the Achaemenids
The Persians are known to have used fifteen war elephants at Gaugamela, but some people[citation needed] claim that they had been used previously in the Greek campaign of king Xerxes I of Persia, and even further back at the time of Darius the Great at the Indus, the Danube and against the Scythians in 512BC. Neither Xenophon nor Herodotus mention war elephants in their accounts of these earlier campaigns.
Under the Sassanids
Julian's campaign
In 363 AD Julian the Apostate marshaled an army of 90,000 Roman troops to invade the Sassanid Territory with the intention of ravaging the Imperial capital of Ctesiphon. The Persian Shah, Shapur II, was astute enough a tactician to realize his soldiers' only chance of challenging the well-trained and better-equipped Romans was a clandestine attack. While the Romans were encamped outside the walls of the capital, the Persians launched a surprise assault onto the unsuspecting army leading with a force of heavy infantry, cataphracts and elephants. Caught unaware, the Roman soldiers fought valiantly but eventually ended up losing the battle.
During the melee, Julian foolishly charged into the conflict without his armour and was injured by an arrow. Although initially surviving, he later succumbed to the injury and died.
Belisarius remarks on Sassanid troops:
| “ | Right for you to despise them. For their whole infantry is nothing more than a crowd of pitiable peasants who come into battle for no other purpose than to dig through walls ... and in general to serve the soldiers. For this reason they have no weapons at all with which they might trouble their opponents, and they only hold before themselves those enormous shields and huge elephants. | ” |
Armenian wars
The most famous was the Battle of Avarayr (Armenian: Ավարայրի ճակատամարտ) in 451 CE, where Armenian rebels led by Vartan Mamikonian led an army of 66,000 men to gain independence from the Sassanids under Yazdegerd II, who opposed them with forces including war elephants.
Despite their victory over the rebels and the death of their leadership (including Vartan Mamikonian), Yazdegerd was generous and gave the Armenians their religious freedom.
Persians fighting elephants
In 1739, Nader Shah of Persia invaded India and led an army to their capital , Delhi but on the way he was halted by the Mughul Indian ruler Muhammad Shah and his huge army, it greatly outnumbered the Persian army. The Indians also had war elephants with them, they had blades on their tusks which they were taught to use against the enemy. Nader shah sent his pots of oil to the front lines where the goats horns were ordered to be set on fire. The goats charged at the elephants who panicked and turned around killing thousands of Indian troops just like at the battle of al-Qādisiyyah, they were proved to be "double edged weapons".
Origin and training
The elephants were hired as mercenary troops as well as their riders. They were from the Indian territories under Persian rule. Some historians say that some were actually from Iran itself. They were called Syrian Elephant. However, this is highly unlikely as most historians and sources do not say this is correct.
All the times Persians used war elephants they were trained by their rider called a mahout, who would also ride the elephant into battle as well. The mahout would be from Indian origin and so were the archers. Training elephants was a difficult job. They would be hard to maintain because they ate so much food and water. Also they were hard to march with as huge paths needed to be cut in order for elephants to march through. Another reason was that they were expensive to hire and sometimes would panic if they were under heavy fire from spears and arrows. Thousands of them lived in the elephant farms[citation needed]. Many were kept in the shah's menagerie the most famous of which was Khosrau II where he kept a "thousand white elephants."
Weapons
Persian elephants were from Indian origin and were probably armed with Indian styled weapons. The men(excluding the driver) sat in a large tower from which troops would fight. The elephant itself would normally be armed with thin plate armour (the Sassanids used chain mail as well as thin plate armour)and would bear a large crenelated wooden howdah on its back[1]. The troops would be armed with bow and arrows and javelin. The sworn enemy of the Sassanids, the Eastern Roman empire, were terrified by the huge beasts, making them very effective in battle. When they were used at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah, they came to be known as "double edged weapons". King ( shah ) Yazdgerd III attempted to use war elephants to fight off Arab invaders, however his elephants got sand in their eyes and panicked. They turned around and ran amok, killing their own troops.
Crushing by elephant
(Persian: زير پى ِپيل افكندن; literally "casting beneath an elephant's feet")
Those people that were traitors to the army, enemies of the empire and criminals were crushed by the elephants this way and executed in the age of Sassanids they also used this method of execution for training for battle.
In popular culture
- In the PC strategy game Age of Empires II the Persians' special unit is the war elephant.
- In the PC strategy game expansion pack Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots the Persians get two special unit lines, one of which is the war elephant, which it shares with India.
- In the strategy game Rome: Total War the Parthians use war elephants. In the expansion Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion the Sassanids can use war elephants as well, and in Rome Total War: Alexander the Achaemenid Persians also have them.
- Shatranj (Persian chess) - which Modern chess has gradually developed from it, same as Indian chess includes the war elephant with the name (fil),meaning elephant in Persian as the bishop
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