The association of War Elephants with the Persian Empire is complicated. The first recorded instance of Persians utilizing elephants is during the Battle of Gaugamela, the final battle between Alexander the Great and King Darius III. Arrian records in his Anabasis Alexandri that the Persian army contained 15 Elephants belonging to the Indians who were allied to King Darius. However, it should be noted here that Arrian does not make mention of the use of these elephants during the battle, and rather acknowledges that they were captured within Darius' camp after the battle had concluded. So while the Persians, at the very least Darius III and the Achaemenid Empire, did have access to War Elephants, the historical sources do not note them as being used in battle against the Macedonians and Greeks (at the very least Arrian does not, though it is important to remember he was writing centuries later using sources we do not have access to).
However, later on the historical sources become more plentiful when describing the Sassanid Empire use of elephants, especially against Rome. The Roman Emperor Severus Alexander notes that the Sassanid's utilized "700 elephants provided with turrets and archers and great loads of arrows", of which the Romans captured 30, slew 200, and led 18 "in triumph". While Severus' account is seen as highly suspect, it does atleast note that the Macedonian triumph over the Persian's elephants centuries prior was well-known and seen as something to emulate. Furthermore, within the Persian book of Kings it is noted that Shapur I faced Roman Emperor Valerian and utilized "war drums strapped to the elephants" to frighten the opposing Roman force. In addition, Emperor Julian "The Apostate" describes the use of elephants by Sassanid King Shapur II during the siege of Nisibis. Finally, Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman Soldier denotes the use of elephants during the same war Julian describes, stating that "Behind these (cavalry) were elephants, looking like walking hills, and by the movements of their enormous bodies, they threatened destruction to all who came near them, dreaded as they were from past experience."
Overall, the association of Persians with War Elephants isn't inaccurate, as Roman sources note the use of the animals by both the Achaemenid Empire and the Sassanids. However, much of the Elephants use by the Persians was as a psychological weapon and one whose dread was meant to last throughout generations, as noted by the Roman sources allegory to Alexander's battle against King Darius and his elephants (even if those elephants did not participate in the battle proper). So to associate elephants with the Achaemenid and Sassanid period's of Persian rule is accurate, though the accounts we have available are likely exaggerated.
Sources Used:
Sarkhosh Curtis, V, Alram, M, Daryaee, T & Pendleton, E 2016, The Parthian and Early Sasanian Empires: Adaptation and Expansion, 1st edn, vol. 5, Oxbow Books, Havertown.
Arrian, and Edward James Chinnock. 1884. The Anabasis of Alexander; or, The history of the wars and conquests of Alexander the Great. Literally translated, with a commentary, from the Greek of Arrian, the Nicomedian. London: Hodder and Stoughton
While the use of war elephants has sometimes been overstated—by both Western media and Persian sources themselves—elephants have played a variety of military roles over a broad swathe of the Persianate world at various historical periods. By “Persianate world,” I mean not just modern Iran, but the numerous Middle, Central, and South Asian regions that have been strongly influenced by different historical Iranian cultures.
It is also worth mentioning, to begin, that elephants are highly intelligent, sensitive, and ecologically important animals. While some became renowned for their fighting prowess, their general eagerness to kill on behalf of humans is doubtful. Their “fickleness” in battle, which not infrequently made them stampede through the ranks of their own handlers, rather suggests they were often unwilling to fight and traumatized by the experience of combat. Undoubtedly, the deployment of war elephants over the past three millennia has occasioned a great amount of suffering and ecological damage.
A giant subspecies of Asian elephant called the Syrian elephant (Elephas maximus asurus) once lived in the forests and deltas of Mesopotamia; it was hunted for its ivory and as a kingly trophy, and seems to have gone extinct around 700 BCE. Afterwards, elephants in the Persianate world were nearly all Indian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus). At least in Achaemenid times, these seem to have ranged as far west as the Helmand river basin, since Darius the Great records tributes of ivory from Arachosia. However, especially later, most were imported from the Indus region of modern Pakistan and India. Breeding elephants in captivity at any kind of scale is very difficult. A anecdote recorded centuries later claims that the presence of a single Iranian-born elephant in the 900-strong elephant corps of the late Sasanian king Khosrow II was considered a miracle. Usually, wild elephants were captured while young, tamed, and then trained.
The first record of a Persian empire using war elephants is Arrian’s account of the fifteen elephants that Darius III included in his forces arrayed against Alexander the Great at Gaugamela in 331 BCE. I say “included” because neither Arrian nor any other historian mentions them playing any role in the battle itself. It is possible that they were a novel addition to the Persian forces, raised alongside other Indian auxiliaries in the dire emergency of the Macedonian invention, but unfamiliar to Darius and his commanders and therefore unused. They may also have been primarily baggage animals or parade beasts rather than fighting elephants. Conversely, Alexander’s army struggled famously against the war elephants of Porus on the Hydaspes (the modern Jhelum, 326 BC).
Hellenistic successor states, particularly the Seleucids and the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms, made use of elephants acquired through trade and tributary relationships with India. Some of these animals seem to have made their way far west, into the armies of kings like Pyrrhus of Epirus. However, the Parthians (247 BCE - 224 CE) do not seem to have deployed war elephants. The sources I have consulted do not say much about why this might have been. Elephants may not yet have acquired the symbolic importance they later held for Persian monarchs. Alternately, the cavalry-based Parthian armies, raised largely from aristocratic estates, may have had neither an economic nor a tactical place for imported pachyderms.
But the Parthians’ successors, the Sasanians, certainly used elephants in warfare. Though primarily deployed in sieges and baggage trains, they did make appearances in pitched battles. Michael B. Charles, the expert on the subject, doubts reports of Sasanian war elephants from the 3rd century. These largely Roman accounts may be using elephants as an exoticizing element for portraying “eastern” armies; the elephants are mentioned alongside scythe chariots, for instance, which were certainly long out of use by that period. Instead, Charles attributes the (re-?)adoption of war elephants to Shāpur II (reigned 309-379!), who revitalized the Iranian military and significantly expanded the empire’s territory. Libianus describes Shāpur outfitting and deploying elephants against Roman armies, while Ammianus provides probably the most complete accounts of Sasanian war elephants: first at Shāpur’s attack on Amida in 359, then during Julian the Apostate’s invasion of the Persian Empire in 363.
Ammianus, who witnessed many of the encounters he writes about, was apparently terrified by the creatures. He describes them as “frightful with their wrinkled bodies and loaded with armed men, a hideous spectacle, dreadful beyond every form of horror” (I believe this is Charles’s translation). However, their usefulness was limited. In a number of battles, Ammianus describes them deployed in the rear rank of the Persian army, but seemingly never engaged in actual combat. At Amida, they were unleashed as living siege towers but routed by fire. Only at the skirmish of Samarra, in which a Persian surprise attack against Julian’s army resulted in the emperor’s death, does Ammianus describe them supporting charges of armored cavalry and becoming enmeshed in the melee. Here he also reports their powerful stench.
Elephants were likely present in the armies of the usurper Bahrām Chо̄bēn (reigned 590-91), both in his campaigns against the Central Asian Turks and Hephthalites and in his struggles for the Iranian throne. He may even have used them, on occasion, to execute his enemies. And the great Arab historian al-Ṭabarī is probably repeating accurate tradition when he places elephants among the Sasanian forces at the decisive battle of al-Qādisiyya (sometime between 634 and 637 CE), in which Muslim forces under Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqās shattered the Persian army of Rostam-e Farrokhzād.
(cont.)
One of the interesting things about this week's theme is that Persia is a ludicrously broad title, a bit like Egypt but with even less obvious divisions in the way people tend to reference it. Persia can equally refer to the 6th Century BCE conquerors of Babylon and to a player in the 19th Century CE Great Game. In this case of both Age of Empires II and Persian war elephants in general, it should be a reference to the Sassanid Persian Empire of the 3rd-7th Centuries CE, not just for the elephants, but most of their other features in AoE too.
The first recorded appearance of war elephants in a Persian army was in the form of 15 pachyderms fielded against Alexander the Great at the Battle of Gaugamela according to Arrian. Not only is 15 a paltry number compared to more elephant heavy armies in India and the Near East in the following centuries, but they don't appear at all until the very end of the Achaemenid Empire - literally the very last battle fought by a semi-legitimate Persian king. The only other reference to war elephants in an ancient Persian context is Ctesias' story of the death of Cyrus the Great in which Cyrus was felled by an Indian javelin thrown by an elephant rider. Ctesias was a physician in the court of Artaxerxes II, so war elephants were known in Persia by the beginning of the 4th Century BCE, but there is no reference to Persians actually commanding them.
The Greco-Macedonian Seleucid dynasty that took over most of Alexander's Empire very famously made extreme use of elephants, going so far as to trade a huge swath of their eastern territory to the Maurya in exchange for 500 Indian Elephants. The Seleucid penchant for elephant warfare may have been a driving force in the capture, taming, and use of Syrian and African elephants in the Hellenistic Period. Interestingly, the Parthians only rarely seem to have made use of elephants. Admittedly, the sources for the Parthian period are very sparse, but the Greco-Roman documents we do have almost never mention them.
The Sassanids were a different story. Shapur I may have fielded a few against Valerian, and the war started by the Roman Emperor Julian agaianst Shapur II featured Sassanid war elephants manned by mounted archers at almost every major battle of the war, including a surprise attack against Jovian after Julian was dead. The Sassanids were especially noted for deploying their elephants as siege weapons. This was mentioned by multiple Romans on multiple occasions, but most notably Procopius who suggest that Justinian I built up the city walls at Dara specifically to defend against elephants. Apparently, the Sassanid siege elephants carried towering howdahs on their backs in addition to their own height, allowing archers to fire down on the walls of a besieged city.
By the end of the Sassanid period, they don't seem to have had much of a specific battlefield role. They don't feature prominently in any of the stories from the final Roman-Sassanid War from 602-628, and when they appear in stories of the Arab Conquest like the Battle of the Bridge or Qadisya they were ineffective. They may have been used by commanders as mobile platforms to survey the battlefield from on high and coordinate troop movements, but there weren't any major tactics associated with elephants like there had been 100 years earlier.
The Arab conquerors did not adopt elephants in any meaningful numbers and they gradually fell out of use in Persian/Iranian armies. Dynasties controlling eastern Iran made limited use of elephants down to the Timurids, but elephant warfare as regular practice was mostly limited to India after the 7th Century.