The History of the World Podcast, written and presented by Chris Hasler.

Welcome to the History of the World Podcast magazine. Oh, yeah. Hello everyone. Welcome to the History of the World Podcast magazine with me, Chris Hasler.

And this week we're going to look back on some of our old episodes or some of the material from our old episodes and

we focus is going to be on some great journeys of history.

So I've picked out the great journeys and of course one of the most obvious

great journeys of ancient history has to be the one of Hannibal Barker of the Carthaginians.

Hannibal's great journey was his daring invasion of Italy during the Second Punic War

where he led his Carthaginian army which included war elephants from Spain

across the Pyrenees the Rhone River and the Alps overcoming many obstacles

and enemies along the way.

Hannibal's great journey was one of the most remarkable feats of military strategy

and endurance in ancient warfare.

Hannibal would set about gathering an army. The size of the army is argued,

and I have seen numbers from 40,000 to 100,000 offered.

Strangely, when investigating the number of elephants in Hannibal's army,

we seem to always hit the specific number of 37 from most sources.

The make-up of the Carthaginian army is also interesting.

Libyan foot soldiers are mentioned and when we look at the Libyans they may have been a mixture of local Berbers and Greek immigrants to North Africa as it was in the Libyan lands that the Greek colony

of Cyrene was established.

Also among the Carthaginian army were Numidian horsemen. The Numidians were the Berbers who lived on the

North African coast of the modern day country of Algeria and as such they had

developed strong diplomatic ties with their Carthaginian neighbors.

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