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020			_a9788178245355
082			_a355.424 TRA
100			_aTrautmann, Thomas R.
245			_aElephants and kings: an environmental history
260			_aRanikhet: _bPermanent Black, _c2018.
300			_axvi, 374p.: _bCol. ill., maps.; pbk.: _c22 cm.
440			_aAshoka University History Series
504			_aIncludes Bibliography and Index
520			_aBecause of their enormous size, elephants have long been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In early civilizations—such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilization, and China—kings used elephants for royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, or the conspicuous consumption of ivory—all of them tending toward the elephant’s extinction. The kings of India, however, as Thomas R. Trautmann shows in this study, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war. Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia (but not China, significantly), a history that spans 3,000 years and a considerable part of the globe, from Spain to Java. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo20273102.html
650			_aElephants
650			_aEnvironmental History
650			_aIndus Civilization
650			_aRoyal Sacrifice
650			_aSpectacular Hunts
650			_aHuman-Elephant Relations
942			_cTD _2ddc
999			_c59711 _d59711