It's the ancients on History Hit, I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast

we are talking once again about the war elephant in antiquity.

Last time we focused on the war elephant in the Salukid or the Salucid Empire but this

time we are going to the true home of the war elephant because we are talking about ancient

India.

Now, I was delighted to be joined by Anarud Kaneseti.

Anarud has two podcasts all about the history of India and you can find links to them in

the description below.

This was a great chat, really eye-opening chat and without further ado, here's Anarud.

Anarud, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you very much to me just kidding.

Well, no problem at all because this is an amazing topic, Indian war elephants.

I mean, Anarud, India, this feels like the true home of the war elephant at least in

antiquity.

Yes, it seems to be from what we can tell the place where the idea of domesticating the

elephant for war really originated and also continued to be the source of a war elephants

for most of classical antiquity as far as we know.

So let's dive into the background first of all and I appreciate you.

We probably don't know exact dates for this but Anarud, when do we think the whole idea

of the war elephant was invented in India?

So that's kind of a difficult thing to really pin down partially because of the lack of

...