What it was

A bronze tablet set up by Hannibal at the sanctuary of Hera Lacinia, on the cape outside Croton, probably in 205–203 BC, near the end of his fifteen years in Italy. It listed the troops he had sent to Africa and left in Spain in 218 BC, down to 21 elephants left behind with his brother, and the army he still had when he came down out of the Alps.

Livy mentions an inscription of Hannibal's at the same temple, on an altar, in Punic and Greek letters. It may be the same record or a second one. Nobody can check.

Polybius read the bronze tablet and decided it was "an absolutely first-rate authority". So nearly every troop number you have read for Hannibal's march traces back to a plate of bronze that no longer exists.

An elephant number from somewhere else

Polybius's other famous elephant number comes in his own account of the crossing, and he does not say it came from the tablet: 37 elephants, ferried over the Rhône on rafts. He never gives a count for the Alps. At the Rhône he calls the men who drove them Indoi, Indians. Most English translations quietly turn that into "mahouts".

Where it went

Nobody knows when the tablet disappeared. Bronze was worth melting down, and the sanctuary itself was later stripped for building stone. One column of the temple still stands on the cape. The stand in this picture is empty on purpose.