Persian war elephants

Persians used war elephants at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC. The battle raged between king Alexander the Great of Macedon and king Darius III of Persia. The Persians had 15 Indian-trained war elephants, which were placed at the centre of the Persian line, and they made such an impression on the Macedonian troops that Alexander felt the need to sacrifice to the God of Fear the night before the battle. Despite this the Persians lost the battle, relinquishing the Achaemenid Persian empire to Alexander. Elephants were later used by the Sassanids under a special chief, known as the Zend−hapet, or "Commander of the Indians," as they were from India.

The Persians are known to have used fifteen war elephants at Gaugamela, but some people claim that they had been used previously in the Greek campaign of King Xerxes I of Persia, and even further back at the time of Darius the Great at the Indus, the Danube and against the Scythians in 512 BC. Neither Xenophon nor Herodotus mention war elephants in their accounts of these earlier campaigns.

The most famous was the Battle of Avarayr (Armenian: Ավարայրի ճակատամարտ) in 451 AD, where Armenian rebels led by Vartan Mamikonian led an army of 66,000 men to gain independence from the Sassanids under Yazdegerd II, who opposed them with 300,000 men and war elephants.

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