Because of their enormous size, elephants have been irresistible for kings as symbols of their eminence. In the early civilisations - Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, the Indus Civilisation, China - kings have used elephants in royal sacrifice, spectacular hunts, public display of live captives, and the conspicuous consumption of ivory - all of them tending toward the elephant's extinction. But the kings of India, as Thomas Trautmann writes in this book, found a use for elephants that actually helped preserve their habitat and numbers in the wild: war.