If that were true, Hannibal's elephants may have represented a smaller, now-extinct subspecies of African elephant; historical accounts described northern African war elephants as fearful of the bigger Indian war elephants, while modern Asian elephants are generally smaller than their African cousins, Herridge explained. Elephants require vast quantities of food — about lbs. But the elephants would likely have handled the terrain and the distance quite well, as they frequently have to cover great distances and cross mountain passes in both Africa and in the Himalayas, Herridge said.
Ultimately, Hannibal's brazen maneuver — elephants and all — couldn't save Carthage, which Rome defeated in the Second Punic War B. However, as this documentary demonstrates, his ambitious journey still fuels imaginations and raises intriguing questions about achieving the seemingly impossible — for people and for elephants.
Mindy Weisberger is a Live Science senior writer covering a general beat that includes climate change, paleontology, weird animal behavior, and space.
It was also forced to surrender its fleet and pay a large indemnity in silver, and to agree never again to re-arm or declare war without permission from Rome. Hannibal, who escaped with his life from the crushing defeat at Zama and still harbored a desire to defeat Rome, retained his military title despite accusations that he had botched the conduct of the war. In addition, he was made a civil magistrate in the government of Carthage.
When Rome later defeated Antiochus, one of the peace terms called for the surrender of Hannibal; to avoid this fate, he may have fled to Crete or taken up arms with rebel forces in Armenia. At some point during this conflict, the Romans again demanded the surrender of Hannibal. Finding himself unable to escape, he killed himself by taking poison in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, probably around B.
Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. By the time the First Punic War broke out, Rome had become the dominant power throughout the Italian He shrewdly combined military Julius Caesar was a renowned general, politician and scholar in ancient Rome who conquered the vast region of Gaul and helped initiate the end of the Roman Republic when he became dictator of the Roman Empire.
Despite his brilliant military prowess, his political skills and his Not very informative, you might think. But mud can encode secrets. Taking an army of tens of thousands, with horses and elephants, over the Alps would have left one heck of a mess. More than two millennia later, Mahaney might have found it. The peaty material is mostly matted with decomposed plant fibres. But at a depth of about 40cm this carbon-based material becomes much more disturbed and compacted, being mixed up with finer-grained soil.
This structure suggests that the bog became churned up when the layer was formed. The researchers then took samples of this disturbed mud back to the lab, where they used chemical techniques to identify some of its organic molecules.
These included substances found in horse dung and the faeces of ruminants. In other words, the layer of disturbed mud is full of crap perhaps not so different from Glastonbury either. Microbiologists collaborating with the team think they might have found a distinctive horse tapeworm egg in the samples. Meanwhile, Mahaney hopes, if he can find the funding, to mount a radar survey of the entire mire and other mires nearby to search for items dropped by the passing army.
Unless they do, other experts may reserve judgment. All the same, he adds, Mahaney is one of the best geo-archaeologists working on the question. If Mahaney can secure firm evidence — such as chemical or microbial fingerprints of elephant faeces — it would be the culmination of a personal quest.
He learned to jest as a lad in Bristol, hometown of the great conceptual jokester Banksy. Allen is the latest British boffin to argue for the Traversette.
The earliest was a naturalist named Cecil Torr, who in his book Hannibal Crosses the Alps tells us that as a teenager he set out, fruitlessly, to find traces of vinegar used, after fires were set to heat rock, in fracturing boulders that blocked the Carthaginian army. His theory was largely ignored until , when Gavin de Beer took up the cause. De Beer gave the topic the scrubbing it deserved, consulting philologists, invoking astronomy to date the setting of the Pleiades, identifying river crossings by plotting seasonal flow, analyzing pollen to estimate the climate in B.
All who have played the Hannibal game know they must discover in their chosen pass a number of specific features that correlate with the chronicles of Polybius and Livy. One by one, de Beer demolished the wealth of alternatives. Walbank certainly thought so. Indeed, in the spirited tradition of academic sport, where the gloves come off when citations are misattributed or a middle initial is misidentified, every theory of the Punic passage withers under a rebuttal.
I know we are often portrayed as being cold and clinical, but we are human beings like everyone else, with all the difficulties that encompasses. Allen came to the work of de Beer by way of Bill Mahaney, a professor emeritus at York University in Toronto and an outspoken exponent of the Traversette.
A couple of years after the two began corresponding in , Mahaney invited Allen on a field trip to a mire below the pass. In contrast to the mild, placid Allen, Mahaney is an irascible mountain man who could start an argument in an empty room. Mahaney has accumulated a vast fund of tales in his expeditions to grand peaks on every continent, particularly the Alps, where over the last 15 years he has assessed possible Punic routes by surveying every pass on the French-Italian border.
He impressed the enemy with his courage and daring and swordplay, fighting on the front lines, wading into the thick of battle. During the Italian campaign Hannibal rode an elephant through a swamp off the Arno and lost the sight in his right eye from what was probably ophthalmia. He became a one-eyed general, like Moshe Dayan. A Roman emperor once wrote that everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact; and everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Which pretty much sums up our understanding of Hannibal, a key figure of European history—if not for what he achieved, then at least for the traumatic effect he had on Roman memory. We know very little about him for certain.
And as Mahaney points out, nearly all of what is known about him and his fantastic gamble over the Alps comes through the filter of his embittered adversaries.
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