King Ptolemy I (Soter) fought with Alexander the Great in India at the Battle of the Hydaspes, against two hundred Indian war elephants. These beasts nearly defeated the Greeks, but careful tactics saved the day for Alexander, in 326 BC.

Alexander took about two hundred war elephants back to Babylon (his capital) and began incorporating them into his army. When he died, the kingdom was divided up, and Ptolemy took Egypt as his base in 322 BC.

He may have captured two dozen war elephants when General Perdiccas attempted to invade Egypt, near Memphis, in 321 BC. However, he never seems to have used them for combat.

Ptolemy did fight against Indian elephants again in the Battle of Gaza in 312 BC. He captured them by using long chains of spikes, carried in front of the elephants by soldiers. The elephants became trapped on the spikes and were caught.

About fifteen years later, Ptolemy I decreed that African elephants should no longer be killed for their ivory, because he wanted to use them for warfare. His new rival, Seleucus of Syria, controlled all the routes to India, and so as Ptolemy's elephants died, he could not replenish the stock.

Not until Ptolemy II Philadelphus, however, did Egypt begin the formal procedure of capturing and training African elephants. This was no easy task, because elephant became extinct in Egypt about 2000 years before Christ, because the Pharoahs had so coveted ivory. Only Nubia, Ethiopia, and Abyssinia were known to still have African elephants. Furthermore, the natives of those lands were accustomed to killing, not catching, these elephants. They had to learn new methods, and Ptolemy hired some advisors from India to help train the elephants and train new riders to care for them.

Ptolemy II established bases and ports along the Red Sea and all the way down to Somalia, whose main purpose was to capture and train war elephants. Once caught, the elephants were trained in basic matters, like movement and obedience. Then they were taken by special barge (invented by Ptolemy or his men) up the Red Sea, marched to the Nile, and then ferried to the elephant base at Memphis. Memphis was chosen because the Nile had only one course here, and so taking the elephants across the Nile to fight would be far simpler than doing so from Alexandria, where the Nile has multiple branches.

In Memphis the elephants were taught to carry small towers (called howdahs) on their backs where archers and javelin throwers could stand. They also learned to wear armor, fearlessness, and how to use their trunks to grab and kill enemy soldiers.

Unfortunately, these east African elephants of the forest were substantially smaller than the Indian elephants of Seleucus. Thus, in the first major battle between Ptolemy's elephants versus Seleucus elephants at Raphia in 217 BC, the African elephants ran away. However, Ptolemy still won the battle.

The Ptolemies continued to use war elephants until the Romans became powerful in the east, because Romans knew well how to kill war elephants, and so they were no longer terribly useful for warfare.