Western asiatic elephant
The Syrian elephant or Western Asiatic elephant (Elephas maximus asurus ) was the westernmost population of the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus ), which became extinct in ancient times. Skeletal remains of E. m. asurus have been recorded from the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey from periods dating between at least 1800 BC and likely 700 BC. Due to the lack of any Late Pleistocene or early to mid Holocene record for Asian elephants in the region, there are suggestions that the elephants were anthropogenically introduced into the region during the Bronze Age, though this is disputed.
Ancient Syrian craftsmen used the tusks of E. m. asurus to make ivory carvings. In Syria, the production of ivory items was at its maximum during the first millennium BC, when the Arameans made splendid ivory inlay for furniture.
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starts withSyrian elephants were among the largest Asian elephant subspecies to have survived into historic times, measuring 3.5 metres (11 ft 6 in) or more at the shoulder; on par with the largest reported Indian elephants. Skeletal remains show it did not differ much from the Indian subspecies, except in size. A study of mitochondrial DNA from 3500 year old remains from Gavur Lake Swamp southwest of Kahramanmaraş in Turkey, which represent an apparently wild population, found that they were within extant genetic variation and belonged to the β1 subclade of the major β clade of Asian elephants, β1 being the predominant clade among Indian elephants. They carried an extremely rare mitochondrial haplotype only previously found in a single modern elephant in Thailand, the origin of the haplotype was placed between 3,700–58,700 years ago with a mean estimate of 23,500 years ago, suggesting that the population did not descend from Middle Pleistocene Elephas fossils known from the region and if it was natural it must have arrived in the region as an expansion from the core range of the Asian elephant during the Late Pleistocene or Holocene. The data was inconclusive as to whether the population had a natural or anthropogenic origin.
In Western Asia, the elephants ranged from the mangrove forests of southern Iran, to southern Anatolia, the Syrian steppes and even extended to Israel. Ashurnasirpal II boasted of killing elephants, along with wild oxen and lions.
