How Carthage Used War Elephants as Ancient Tanks

When the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps from Spain to Italy in 218 B.C., he reportedly brought 70,000 men, 20,000 horses and 37 elephants. Carthage wasn’t the first ancient military power to use war elephants—the practice had been widespread in India for centuries earlier—but Hannibal was willing to march his elephants over the snow-capped mountains because he knew they would send a powerful message to the Roman enemy.

“There was both symbolic and real power that was manifested in the elephant,” says Eve MacDonald, senior lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University. “Controlling those elephants, even having them there on the battlefield, was an epic statement of your material wealth, the range of your land and allies, and the ways in which you operate. Just feeding elephants over thousands of kilometers like Hannibal did—that kind of stuff was really extraordinary.”

Carthage deployed war elephants in several key victories against Rome during the Punic Wars, a series of wars fought between the rival Mediterranean powers from 264 B.C. to 146 B.C.

With their sheer size and strength, war elephants functioned like ancient tanks, charging through cavalry lines and trampling infantry. While elephants weren’t a foolproof strategy—when panicked, they could run amok and trample their own soldiers—they were particularly effective against inexperienced fighters who were terror-stricken by the towering beasts.

“The Carthaginians were probably using elephants for shock and awe more than actual military strategy, because many of the people they’re fighting against would never have come close to seeing elephants before,” says MacDonald, author of Carthage: A New History of an Ancient Empire.

War elephants were legendary in the ancient world. According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great was the first Greek general to encounter war elephants when he faced the Indian King Poros at Battle of Hydaspes in 326 B.C.

Plutarch, writing centuries later, claimed that Poros was so tall that he rode his elephant like a horse and that his elephant was so loyal and intelligent that, at the end of the battle, it gently pulled the spears from King Poros’ wounded body with its muscular trunk.

Alexander defeated Poros, and the victory was celebrated with a silver coin depicting a Macedonian horseman attacking a war elephant. But the reason Alexander’s army refused to march deeper into India was that his men had heard rumors of Indian kings commanding armies of 6,000 war elephants. It was elephants, in other words, that forced Alexander to finally end his conquests and go home.

The Romans didn’t face war elephants in battle until 280 B.C., when King Pyrrhus, a Greek successor to Alexander the Great, invaded Italy with 20 elephants. At the Battle of Heraclea, the Roman horses were “terrified” at the sight (and smell) of Pyrrhus’ elephants, wrote Plutarch, and “ran away with their riders.” Panicked Roman infantrymen were trampled by elephants or killed by spearmen riding in turrets on the elephants’ backs, wrote later historians.

After Pyrrhus defeated the Romans at great cost—giving rise to the term “Pyrrhic victory”—he brought his elephants to Sicily to fight the Carthaginians.

“The Carthaginians had almost certainly not used elephants in warfare until they faced Pyrrhus in the early third century,” MacDonald says. “It really does change their military outlook, and we know that later Carthaginians studied Pyrrhus’ strategic writings. Hannibal was supposedly a great student of Pyrrhus.”

After seeing elephants in action in Sicily, the Carthaginians began raising their own elephant army. Scholars think that Carthaginian war elephants weren’t Indian elephants but a smaller species called the North African bush elephant. Now extinct, North African bush elephants were native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria and stood 8 feet at the shoulders compared to 11 feet for Asian elephants.

The smaller Carthaginian elephants couldn’t support turrets with multiple riders like Pyrrhus’ Asian elephants, but their squat, solid build made them effective as single-rider “tanks,” says Louis Rawlings, a historian of ancient warfare and lecturer at Cardiff University.

“For Carthage, the elephant itself is the weapon,” Rawlings says. “We hear a lot about elephants engaging with infantry. Trampling seems to be the predominant thing and occasionally impaling using their tusks. And horses, when they first encounter elephants, don’t like them at all. Horses are well and truly freaked out by them.”

The first major Carthaginian victory using war elephants came at the Battle of Bagradas in 255 B.C. against Rome during the First Punic War. During the battle, Carthage was on the ropes until it got help from a mercenary Spartan general named Xanthippus, who led a charge of 100 elephants directly at the center of the Roman infantry. The elephants sowed chaos among the Roman formations, giving the Carthaginian cavalry a chance to outflank and envelop the enemy.

“Elephants alone were not going to win the battle, because it was Carthage’s 100 elephants against 10,000 men,” Rawlings says. “Elephants were a disruption tactic, because everyone’s having to deal with these enormous things rampaging around, doing damage and killing people.”

Another Carthaginian tactic was to pair elephants with clusters of “skirmishers,” specialized infantry composed of elite archers, slingers and javelin throwers. The elephants acted like tanks, clearing a path for the skirmishers, who in turn were supposed to protect the elephants from enemy missiles.

Carthaginian war elephants also had their weaknesses, which the Romans eventually learned to exploit. During early clashes with Pyrrhus’ elephants, Rome experimented with all kinds of anti-elephant tactics, including ox-drawn wagons equipped with spikes and scythes, and poles wrapped in flammable pitch-soaked cloth that could be and thrust into the elephants’ faces.

A more disturbing tactic, recorded by later Roman sources, was to cover live pigs in flammable pitch, set them loose on the battlefield and light them on fire. Their awful squeals allegedly sent the elephants into a panic. Rawlings doubts the authenticity of the “bacon attack,” as he calls it, but admits that “anything that’s mobile and flaming and running towards you is probably something you would want to avoid as an elephant.”

During the pivotal Battle of Panormus in 250 B.C. in Sicily, the Roman general Metellus was able to repel a charge of Carthaginian elephants by raining javelins down upon them. The wounded elephants “turned on their own troops, trampling down and killing the men and disturbing and breaking the ranks,” wrote Polybius a century later.

After Hannibal crossed the Alps, he and his 37 elephants soundly defeated the Romans at the Battle of the Trebia, but the Roman generals quickly adapted and came up with strategies to neutralize the Carthaginian elephant attack.

At the Battle of Zama in 202 B.C., Hannibal attempted a frontal assault on the Roman infantry with 80 war elephants that were relatively young and unproven in battle. The Roman general Scipio countered with a brilliant strategy. He arranged his infantry in deep formations, and as Hannibal’s elephants charged, the Romans opened corridors through their ranks.

“The elephants followed the paths of least resistance,” Rawlings says. “They went down these lanes, and skirmishers were jumping in and out and stabbing them from the sides.”

The elephants that survived the Roman gauntlet were hunted down or captured. Others, running without drivers, collided with the Carthaginian cavalry, causing further chaos. The Battle of Zama was Hannibal’s worst defeat and his last battle against the Romans.

As part of the treaty ending the Second Punic War, Carthage was forbidden from raising or keeping war elephants. While some historians have questioned the usefulness of war elephants in battle, Rawlings thinks that the Roman ban speaks volumes.

“The fact that the Romans took so much effort to deny elephants to the defeated has partly to do with the efficacy of elephants in general,” Rawlings says. “Pro-Roman sources love to characterize elephants as problematic, but the fact that they forbade elephants suggests that elephants really were a threat, even against a well-trained Roman army.”