More likely, based on the provenance of the Elephant, it is a stylised depiction of a calf of the Syrian Elephant, or a stylised depiction of an adult. Due to the existence of tusks on what seems to be a small elephant, it has been suggested that the elephant was a late surviving Dwarf Elephant or Mammoth from the Mediterranean islands, captured by Syrian traders. Īn elephant also featured in the menagerie of the 18th century Egyptian vizier Rekhmire (fig 1.), which a scene on the walls of his tomb depicts being carried from Retnu (the Levant).

Archaeological evidence from the Orontes valley also suggests elephants were hunted in the region, with elephant bones found in the region having clear cut and saw marks. On the way back from a campaign against the Kingdom of Mitanni, Pharaoh Thutmose III (1481-1425) hunted 120 (possibly a symbolic number) elephants in the Orontes valley, an event well attested by several Egyptian records.

Egyptians too, likewise, hunted elephants in the Near East. The Neo-Assyrian king Adad-Nirari II (912–891 BC) boasts not only of hunting Elephants, but also of ‘forming herds’ in the city of Ashur, for the purpose of canned-hunting. Earlier Assyrian Kings, such as Tiglath-Pileser I (1114–1076 BC) would apparently hunt elephants in the countryside around Harran, now south-eastern Turkey. Later kings such as Sargon II and Esarhaddon mention taking elephant hides and ivory as tribute, but never actually the hunting or capture of live elephants. This general era is also when we last find elephant remains in the archaeological record before the Seleucid era. It is in the reign of Shalmaneser (859-824 BC) that we last see reference to the capture or hunting of elephants in Assyrian records, which may suggest the elephant became extinct, or at least very rare in Assyria during or shortly after his reign.

The elephant (pīru) was apparently a familiar enough creature to the Assyrians to be featured fairly anatomically accurately in the Black Obelisk of King Shalmaneser III, when compared to more exotic creatures such as Monkeys. Later records (with one possible exception, the famous elephant owned by Hannibal Barca known as ‘The Syrian’) are definitely of elephants imported from India for the use of warfare. The Asian Elephant (Elephas Maximus) was present in the Ancient Near East until the Neo-Assyrian period (10th-7th centuries BC). This essay will discuss the identity of several creatures mentioned and depicted in Akkadian, Egyptian, and Hebrew texts and artwork, as well as controversies related to the creatures thereof. Nonetheless, many other species, today extinct in the region, or worldwide in some cases, lived in the region of the Near East in the early historical period, such as Elephants, Aurochsen, and Hippopotami. As previous articles on this website have shown, many species of Camel, some of vast size once lived in the region during the Pleistocene, but by the time the Sumerians and Egyptians invented writing in the 4th millennium BC, all but one species was long gone. The Ancient Near East was home to much wildlife, many of which are now sadly gone.

Mythological elephant predators