In S1E9 of the German TV show “Dark”, a character makes the following remark: “Do you believe that Hannibal marched over the Alps with elephants? There are no truths - just stories”.
This got me thinking. I’ve heard the Hannibal and the Alps story so many times that I’ve never thought to question it, but now that I stop and consider, it does seem a wildly improbable feat. Do we have any kind of physical evidence for this crossing, and if not, how reliable are our textual sources? Is it possible that such a widely-believed historical fact is merely a creation of later Roman writers?
I’m interested in the historiographical question here, as well. Is there a tradition of doubting the mainstream account of Hannibal’s invasion that the show-writers might be pulling from? Perhaps it’s more prevalent in German scholarship?
We need to distinguish two type of evidences in this case. In the case of written sources we have several authors that point to the crossing. The one that we have that is closer to the episode is Polybius, that lived during the second century BC. I say closer because several authors contemporary to the event writted about it but they have not survived. We know that they exist because some authors mention them. For example, Polybius critise several authors that describe the crossing of the Alps. In other cases, he mention other in several instances. For example, we know that Sosylus, the Greek tutor of Hannibal, wrotte an account of the war. In his case, it has survived a fragment in which he narrates the Roman victory, with the help of the massaliots, in the naval battle in the Ebro river.
Apart from this evidence, Mahanan has been pointing that some evidences of a great concentration of horse excrements in some areas of the Alps. This theory needs to be checked from an archaeological perspective. An army, even when passing can leave evidences. In this sense, a good survey could finds elements connected to the Carthaginian army. Yet, considering that classical authors mention that no elephants died during the crossing the only evidence will need to be excrements or maybe some pieces of equipment that could be linked to the elephants.