Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson
dynasty (2750 to 2625 BC), a hunting scene that included a giraffe was carved in bas relief on the tomb of King Unas at Sakkara. The tomb of Ukt-Hop in the twelfth dynasty (2000 to 1780 BC) portrayed, alongside the hunting dog and the arrow-pierced antelope, another hunted giraffe. But that was the last. Giraffes may have gone locally extinct in Egypt around four thousand years ago.6
Giraffes were still alive, of course, enduring in richer and less settled lands to the south. But contact between Egyptians and their southern neighbors along the Nile Valley was limited by the difficulty of passing through the river’s cataracts and the forbidding deserts and mountains surrounding them.
Queen Hatshepsut, the fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty (1508 to 1458 BC), overcame that limitation by organizing trading voyages on the Red Sea. Hatshepsut sent five large ships, each around seventy feet long and crewed by more than two hundred men, down the Red Sea to what was called the Land of Punt at its southern end, thereby enriching the Egyptian treasury with such coveted items as gold, ivory, ebony, and myrrh. The ivory came from elephants, but Egyptian records of the expedition indicate that Punt was also a land of baboons, hippopotami, and leopards, while carvings on Hatshepsut’s tomb indicate a live giraffe brought back from Punt as a gift or tribute to the queen.7 A few other pharaohs received giraffes as tribute from lands along the southern Nile, including King Tutankhamun and, as I mentioned earlier, Ramses the Great. Then came the thousand-year gap.
In Egypt, giraffes may have simply ceased to exist, even as lonely captive animals kept alive in some pharaoh’s garden, after the death of Ramses. How much longer would it take before that absence of physical fact would become an absence in memory? And as Egypt was drawn, during the next millennium, into the orbit of a larger Mediterranean culture, how would that amnesia come to affect the Western world of classical times?
The Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BC) traveled extensively in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and he spent time in Egypt around 454 BC. Herodotus regularly included in his nine-volume History the often strange and sometimes fanciful accounts of travelers to and from exotic places. Herodotus had nothing to say about giraffes.
A century later, Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote with astonishing catholicity and an often impressive precision about zoology and natural history, producing the world’s first zoological encyclopedia. Firsthand knowledge about elephants arrived in the Mediterranean basin during Aristotle’s lifetime, brought from the east by his erstwhile student, Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s extended and detailed commentary on elephants was generally accurate enough to remain relevant until well into modern times. He, too, failed even to mention giraffes.
By the time of Herodotus and Aristotle, giraffes may simply have ceased to exist for the Mediterranean world, physically or conceptually. Neither whispered nor speculated about. Not remembered or dreamed about. Not even imagined as, say, a fantasy creature of many parts, a strange and mythical chimera rising out of some wavering obscurity at the far end of the Nile.
Ptolemy II Philadelphus reopened the door to giraffes not so much out of curiosity or a sense of adventure, although such inclinations surely were part of the equation. He did it, perhaps primarily, out of an ordinary, old-fashioned fear: the reasonable fear of being annihilated in war.
Elephants had come to the Mediterranean in 325 BC, when Alexander the Great returned from India trailing, as tribute extorted in peace and booty seized in war, around two hundred fearsome war elephants. Establishing his imperial capital at Babylon, the young man settled down to rule his empire from a golden throne in a tented pavilion, surrounded by a bodyguard of Persian and Greek soldiers and a central corps of war elephants. He appointed an elephantarch, a commander of the elephants, and he moved to integrate the animals more fully into his own forces. Elephants would be an essential part of his new war machine and would lead him to future conquests and even greater glories . . . or so the young man may have dreamed. Unhappily, he died of a sudden illness at the age of thirty-two, before any such dreams could be realized.
Alexander’s death was also the death of an empire. In a series of campaigns waged south into Palestine and Egypt, west into Turkey and Greece and Italy, his several former generals and viceroys fought each other ferociously, using the latest and most impressive weapon anyone from the West had ever seen: elephants, the battle tanks of the classical world.8
Among the competing inheritors of the shattered empire were Seleucus and Ptolemy I. Seleucus established his military headquarters in northern Syria, where he stabled his own trained corps of about five hundred elephants recently acquired from India. A glorious image of elephants pulling Seleucus on a chariot was stamped onto a coin of the realm, while the real Seleucus and his real elephants in Syria must have disturbed the sleep of Ptolemy I in Egypt, who could marshal only a few dozen of the creatures with which to defend himself and his piece of empire.
Ptolemy I acquired some of the imperial charisma by stealing Alexander the Great’s body as it was being shipped back to Greece, then installing the rotting corpse in a gold sarcophagus inside a grand mausoleum at Alexandria, the newly founded city at the Mediterranean tip of Egypt. But charisma was no substitute for elephants, and, for Ptolemy, the big problem with elephants was how difficult they were to acquire. Indeed, the fact that all war elephants came from India and were members of the Asian species now put Ptolemy and his pathetic pack of pachyderms at a terrible disadvantage, since Seleucus controlled the route east to India.
Ptolemy’s solution was to look south, to the shady glens and shadowed forests of deeper Africa, Africa south of the Sahara, and to acquire African elephants. After Ptolemy’s death, his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus took up the cause. It was already known that such animals could be found to the south of Egypt, but Philadelphus sent military and diplomatic expeditions down the Red Sea and up the Nile to discover more precisely where they were and how to get some. Some of those expeditions returned with reports on the geography, people, resources, and mercantile opportunities in lands south along the Red Sea, while others reinforced the long-standing ties between Egypt and the people living along the southern Nile, particularly in the kingdom of Meroë, in today’s Sudan.
To Meroë, Philadelphus sent teams of Egyptian soldiers and Indian elephant trainers (mahouts) who, working with the local experts, began to capture, tame, and train elephants.9 Meroë maintained its regular trade with Egypt, going north by way of the Nile, but the river’s cataracts meant that the captured elephants could not be sent directly north on river boats. Instead, once they had been trained well enough to walk under the command of the Indian mahouts, they were marched east for several days until they reached the Red Sea, loaded onto specially designed (sturdy, flat-bottomed, shallow-drafted) elephant boats, then sailed north for several days to a few weeks, then marched west across the desert for about twelve days until they reached the Nile in Egypt. At the great river, the elephants were walked onto barges and floated downstream to Memphis, where they would be trained to serve in war.
Had he been a warrior like his father, Philadelphus might have been satisfied with the growing size and power of his new elephant corps in Memphis. But Philadelphus, for all his emotional and physical weaknesses, was imaginatively ambitious in ways his father was not. In the words of the first-century Greek geographer Strabo of Ephesus, the young Ptolemy was “of an inquiring disposition, and on account of the infirmity of his body was always searching for novel pastimes and enjoyments.”10
The father had established the great museum and library at Alexandria, but the son brought in scholars and expanded those institutions until Alexandria was the center of learning for the Western world. Likewise, Philadelphus was not content with the acquisition of elephants, or even with the southern expeditions’ secondary effect of opening new gold mines and expanding Egypt’s trade and influence into Arabia, India, and sub-Saharan Africa.11 Philadelphus encouraged the capture and transport of all sorts of exotic animals, bringing them back as specimens for his growing menagerie in Alexandria.12 None of these animals would be useful in the way he expected elephants to be, of course, but for Philadelphus they were parts of a living zoology and at the same time impressive collector’s items that would contribute to the charisma any great ruler strives to maintain.
The Greek historian Diodorus