Elephants and Kings

An Environmental History

Edición de la obra Elephants and Kings

Because of their enormous size, elephants have been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In the early civilisations - Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilisation, China - kings have used elephants in royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, and the conspicuous consumption of ivory - all of them tending toward the elephant's extinction. But the kings of India, as Thomas Trautmann writes in this book, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war.