Chandragupta Maurya reportedly fielded 9,000 war elephants at his height
Ancient Indian writers said an army without elephants was as contemptible as a forest without a lion or a kingdom without a king. At the peak of the Maurya Empire, Chandragupta reportedly commanded 9,000 war elephants, overseen by a dedicated board of his war office and a superintendent of elephants.
A war elephant, weighing roughly 3,500 to 5,000 kilograms, was trained to charge, smash enemy ranks and spread panic. Elephant warfare is widely thought to have begun in ancient India; it is not prominent in early Vedic texts but was common by the sixth century BC, as Vedic kingdoms spread across the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The epics Ramayana and Mahabharata describe it in detail, and the classic Indian army had four arms: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. Kings mostly rode chariots, yet elite warriors preferred elephants.
King Bimbisara of Magadha, around 543 BC, leaned heavily on elephants as he expanded his realm. Chandragupta's reported force included 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry and 8,000 chariots alongside the elephants, and his 30-member war office had six boards, one dedicated to them. Rajendra Chola later fielded armoured elephants in his campaigns. Pliny the Elder claimed Sri Lankan elephants were bigger and fiercer than others, which, with nearby seaports, made them a valuable export.
Only a handful of southern Chinese states adopted elephants, with little success. Chu tried them against Wu in 506 BC and failed, and in 554 AD the Liang dynasty's armoured, tower-carrying elephants were beaten by Western Wei archers. Chinese armies more often met elephants abroad; in 605 the Sui dug pits to trap those of the Champa kingdom of Lâm Ấp in present-day southern Vietnam.
The practice spread west to Achaemenid Persia, and Europeans first faced it at Gaugamela in 331 BC. Macedon, the Hellenistic states, Carthage and Rome all used elephants, and Southeast Asian kingdoms kept them permanently. Gunpowder eventually ended their battlefield role, leaving them to engineering, labour and ceremony.
Source: War elephant
