Endnote 11 – Marisa Tomb Paintings

Scholars have remarked on the small size of this elephant in relation to the adjacent rhinoceros. It is now known that the strain of African elephant that was imported into Ptolemaic Egypt was not of the large Bush or Savannah, but a smaller forest species that populated the coastal and sub-desert areas of the Horn of Africa. See Howard Hayes Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), pp. 23–25 and 60–63. In height and weight the Forest elephant is fairly close to the main variety of Indian elephant, but slightly smaller, as several classical authors maintain. See Polybius v 84; Pliny, Natural History, viii 9 (32); Diodorus Siculus, ii 16, 4; Strabo, xv 1, 43. Formerly the Forest elephant was believed to be an African sub-species, but recent research has shown that the genetic differences between the Forest and Savannah elephants are sufficient to justify classifying them as distinct species; see A.L. Roca et al, “Genetic Evidence for Two Species of Elephant in Africa,” Science 293, 2001, pp. 1473–77. It has a darker grey coloring, its ears are more rounded than those of its larger African relative. The elephant portrayed in this painting most closely approximates to this smaller species, which survives precariously in isolated pockets of west and central Africa.