Sudan.
To Meroë, Philadelphus sent teams of Egyptian soldiers and Indian elephant trainers (mahouts) who, working with the local experts, began to capture, tame, and train elephants.9 Meroë maintained its regular trade with Egypt, going north by way of the Nile, but the river’s cataracts meant that the captured elephants could not be sent directly north on river boats. Instead, once they had been trained well enough to walk under the command of the Indian mahouts, they were marched east for several days until they reached the Red Sea, loaded onto specially designed (sturdy, flat-bottomed, shallow-drafted) elephant boats, then sailed north for several days to a few weeks, then marched west across the desert for about twelve days until they reached the Nile in Egypt. At the great river, the elephants were walked onto barges and floated downstream to Memphis, where they would be trained to serve in war.
Had he been a warrior like his father, Philadelphus might have been satisfied with the growing size and power of his new elephant corps in Memphis. But Philadelphus, for all his emotional and physical weaknesses, was imaginatively ambitious in ways his father was not. In the words of the first-century Greek geographer Strabo of Ephesus, the young Ptolemy was “of an inquiring disposition, and on account of the infirmity of his body was always searching for novel pastimes and enjoyments.”10
The father had established the great museum and library at Alexandria, but the son brought in scholars and expanded those institutions until Alexandria was the center of learning for the Western world. Likewise, Philadelphus was not content with the acquisition of elephants, or even with the southern expeditions’ secondary effect of opening new gold mines and expanding Egypt’s trade and influence into Arabia, India, and sub-Saharan Africa.11 Philadelphus encouraged the capture and transport of all sorts of exotic animals, bringing them back as specimens for his growing menagerie in Alexandria.12 None of these animals would be useful in the way he expected elephants to be, of course, but for Philadelphus they were parts of a living zoology and at the same time impressive collector’s items that would contribute to the charisma any great ruler strives to maintain.
The Greek historian Diodorus wrote that Philadelphus was “interested in capturing elephants” and “gave liberal rewards to those who engaged in the strange hunts for these powerful animals. He spent large sums of money on this hobby, and collected a considerable number of war elephants; moreover he acquainted the Greek world with other strange and unheard of animals.”13 Philadelphus’s giraffe, exhibited before the world that winter’s day in the third decade of the third century before Christ, was one of those “strange and unheard of animals.”
Giraffes, in truth, were so strange and unheard of that neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians knew what to call them, and so the Greeks were forced to invent a name.
The difficulty of choosing a name for this creature was like that of naming anything that appears strikingly outside the usual categories—like, for example, naming an unusual sound or a peculiar smell. Without the guidance of comparative examples or rational categories, one resorts to creative metaphor.
The namers of Philadelphus’s giraffe could have been the leaders of an early capture expedition to the south. Perhaps they were Greek translators chatting casually with Egyptian crew members on an elephant boat transporting the just-captured animal north on the Red Sea. Whoever they were, the namers would have had the same problem—what do you call something that defies the known categories?—and so they named him using the most telling associations they could think of. The creature had a rather camel-like face, and he seemed tall and lanky like a camel. At the same time he had those peculiar spots. Not at all like a camel. More like a leopard.
They called this new animal a camel-leopard—or, as the English translators more often represent it, a camelopard. And since the Greeks, like the rest of us, had trouble distinguishing a figure of speech from a figure of fact, they came to imagine that camelopards were the natural product of a camel mating with a leopard. They were hybrids in name and fact, fantastic chimeras taken from the depths of sub-Saharan Africa.
The Greek historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus, writing around 104 BC, refers to giraffes in his natural history of human tribes and exotic animals living in the harsh regions west of the Red Sea. His original text was lost, but not before later authors extracted passages, such as the reference to giraffes as animals “which the Greeks call camelopardalis, a composite name which describes the double nature of this quadruped. It has the varied coat of a leopard, the shape of a camel and is of a size beyond measure. Its neck is long enough for it to browse in the tops of trees.”14
Strabo of Ephesus, however, writing in the next century (and citing the work of a geographer named Artemidorus, whose work has been lost) insisted that “camelopards . . . are in no respect like leopards”:
for the dappled marking of their skin is more like that of a fawnskin, which latter is flecked with spots, and their hinder parts are so much lower than their front parts that they appear to be seated on their tail parts, which have the height of an ox, although their forelegs are no shorter than those of camels; and their necks rise high and straight up, their heads reaching much higher than those of camels. On account of this lack of symmetry the speed of the animal cannot, I think, be so great as stated by Artemidorus, who says that its speed is not to be surpassed. Furthermore, it is not a wild beast but rather a domesticated animal, for it shows no signs of wildness.15
Strabo was wrong, of course, in insisting that giraffes are domestic animals. But he was right in recognizing their gentleness. And his second error, that they are not especially fast runners, confirms the already obvious fact that he never saw a giraffe running free. Still, the overall precision and self-assurance of Strabo’s description do suggest that he had either seen a live giraffe—albeit one in captivity—or spoken at length with someone who had.
If so, which giraffe might that be?
Strabo traveled widely in the eastern Mediterranean; he came to Rome around 44 BC, and he took part in a Roman expedition up the Nile into southern Egypt in 25–24 BC—just a few years after Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, committed suicide, thereby ending the rule of the Greeks. Egypt became a Roman colony. But Cleopatra, during a happier time and following the fashion that originated with Philadelphus two centuries earlier, probably kept exotic animals on the palace grounds in Alexandria. Perhaps Strabo saw one of Cleopatra’s giraffes, after she was gone and Romans were occupying the palace. . . . Or perhaps Strabo was in some way familiar with the live giraffe Julius Caesar displayed in Rome as part of his 46 BC triumph, which happened while Cleopatra was still alive: Caesar’s guest in Rome while still Egypt’s queen.
Romans had by then become accustomed to seeking live animals for their increasingly grand and fantastically bloody animal spectacles. Exotic live animals thus became part of the normal economic exchange between Rome and her colonial empire. From the colonial wildernesses, then, specimens were routinely captured, caged or otherwise restrained, placed on any available boats, and shipped to Rome.16 Giraffes, though, only came into the Mediterranean from Egypt, taken as ever from far to the south—Ethiopia, for instance—and passed as usual down the Nile, portaged across the cataracts, brought into the country as a prize for the royal collection in Alexandria. To be sure, Caesar’s soldiers could have acquired one directly, from a commercial or diplomatic exchange with people to the south of Egypt. But I agree with biographer Stacy Schiff author of Cleopatra: A Life (2011), who argues that the Egyptian queen herself was probably the original owner of Caesar’s giraffe.17
Cleopatra left for Rome in the summer of 46 BC, transported, along with her and Caesar’s one-year-old son, Ptolemy Caesar, plus essential servants, in a naval galley: likely a swift-running 120-foot trireme powered by square-rigged sails and 170 oarsmen. The royal boat proceeded out of the Alexandrian harbor accompanied by a grand flotilla of supporting vessels,
