Henry Yule

“ The oldest Hebrew mention of ivory is in the notice of the products brought to Solomon from Ophir, or India. Among these are ivory tusks—shen-habbim, i.e. 'teeth of habbīm,' a word which has been interpreted as from Skt. ibha, elephant. [5] But it is entirely doubtful what this habbīm, occurring here only, really means. [6] We know from other evidence that ivory was known in Egypt and Western Asia for ages before Solomon. And in other cases the Hebrew word for ivory is simply shen, corresponding to dens Indus in Ovid and other Latin writers. ”

“ And if the Greeks had a vernacular name for the elephant, there is also a probability, if not a presumption, that some tradition of this name would be found, mutatis mutandis, among other Aryan nations of Europe.
Now may it not be that ἐλέφας—φαντος in Greek, and ulbandus in Moeso-Gothic, represent this vernacular name? The latter form is exactly the modification of the former which Grimm's law demands. Nor is the word confined to Gothic. It is found in the Old H. German (olpentâ) ; in Anglo-Saxon (olfend, oluend, &c.) ; in Old Swedish (aelpand, alwandyr, ulfwald) ”

“ The oldest occurrence of the word (ἐλέφας—φαντος) is in Homer. With him, and so with Hesiod and Pindar, the word means 'ivory.' Herodotus first uses it as the name of the animal (iv. 191) . Hence an occasional, probably an erroneous, assumption that the word ἐλέφας originally meant only the material, and not the beast that bears it.
In Persian the usual term for the beast is pīl, with which agree the Aramaic pīl (already found in the Chaldee and Syriac versions of the O. T.) , and the Arabic fīl. Old etymologists tried to develop elephant out of fīl ”

“ Pott, besides other doubts, objects that ibhadantā, though the name of a plant (Tiaridium indicum, Lehm.) , is never actually a name of ivory.
Pott's own etymology is alaf-hindi, 'Indian ox,' from a word existing in sundry resembling forms, in Hebrew and in Assyrian (alif, alap) . [7] This has met with favour; though it is a little hard to accept any form like Hindī as earlier than Homer.
Other suggested origins are Pictet's from airāvata (lit. 'proceeding from water') , the proper name of the elephant of Indra, or Elephant of the Eastern Quarter in the Hindu Cosmology. ”

“ On the left side of this chapel is a doorway 6 palms in depth and 5 in width, by which one enters a chamber which is nearly square and very dark, so that there is nothing to be seen there; and with this ends the fabric of this great pagoda. It has been in many parts demolished; and what the soldiers have left is so maltreated that it is grievous to see destroyed in such fashion one of the Wonders of the World. It is now 50 years since I went to see this marvellous Pagoda ”

“ In various suggestions, including Pott's, besides others that we have omitted, the etymology has been based on a transfer of the name of the ox, or some other familiar quadruped. There would be nothing extraordinary in such a transfer of meaning. The reference to the bos Luca [19] is trite; the Tibetan word for ox (glan) is also the word for 'elephant'; we have seen how the name 'Great Boar' is alleged to be given to the elephant among the Kabyles; we have heard of an elephant in a menagerie being described by a Scotch rustic as 'a muckle sow' ”

“ In the case of these Assyrian inscriptions, however, elephant is by no means an undisputed interpretation. In the famous quadruple test exercise on this inscription in 1857, which gave the death-blow to the doubts which some sceptics had emitted as to the genuine character of the Assyrian interpretations, Sir H. Rawlinson, in this passage, rendered the animals slain and taken alive as wild buffaloes. The ideogram given as teeth he had not interpreted. ”

“ But knowledge acquired, or at least taken cognizance of, since Pott's latest reference to the subject, puts us in possession of the new and surprising fact that, even in times which we are entitled to call historic, the elephant existed wild, far to the westward of India, and not very far from the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean. ”

“ More certain is the fact that in early Swedish and Danish the word for 'elephant' is fil, in Icelandic fill; a term supposed to have been introduced by old traders from the East viâ Russia. The old Swedish for 'ivory' is filsben. ”

“ If then these elephant-hunts may be located on the southern skirts of Taurus, we shall more easily understand how a tribute of elephant-tusks should have been offered at the court of Egypt by the people of Rutennu or Northern Syria, and also by the people of the adjacent Asebi or Cyprus, as we find repeatedly recorded on the Egyptian monuments, both in hieroglyphic writing and pictorially. ”

“ Quoiqu'il en soit, si l'on considère cette quantité de Temples spacieux, remplis de pilastres et de colonnes, et tant de milliers de figures, et le tout taillé dans le roc vif, on peut dire avec verité que ces ouvrages surpassent la force humaine ”

“ The best quality of this wood, once much valued in Europe as incense, is the result of disease in a tree of the N. O. Leguminosae, the Aloexylon agallochum, Loureiro, growing in Camboja and S. Cochin China, whilst an inferior kind, of like aromatic qualities, is produced by a tree of an entirely different order, Aquilaria agallocha, Roxb. (N. O. Aquilariaceae) , which is found as far north as Silhet. [2]
Eagle-wood is another name for aloes-wood, or aloes (q.v.) ”

“ Ellora is only a short distance from this place. At some very remote period a race of men, as if by magic, excavated caves high up among the defiles of the mountains. These rooms extended over a breadth of one kos. ”

“ It is named in another inscription between Arinath and Akerith, as, all three, cities of Naharain or Northern Mesopotamia, captured by Amenhotep II., the son of Thotmes III. Might not Ni be Nisibis? We shall find that Assyrian inscriptions of later date have been interpreted as placing elephant-hunts in the land of Harran and in the vicinity of the Chaboras. ”

“ Kittel (Indian Antiquary, i. 128) , who supposes the first part of the word to be Dravidian, a transformation from āne, 'elephant.' Pictet, finding his first suggestion not accepted, has called up a Singhalese word aliya, used for 'elephant,' which he takes to be from āla, 'great' ”

“ Mr. Skeat writes: "the question is a difficult one. Klinkert gives garu (garoe) and gaharu (gaharoe) , whence the trade names 'Garrow' and 'Garroo'; and the modern standard Malay certainly corresponds to Klinkert's forms, though I think gaharu should rather be written gharu, i.e. with an aspirated g, which is the way the Malays pronounce it. On the other hand, it seems perfectly clear that there must have been an alternative modern form agaru, or perhaps even aguru, since otherwise such trade names as 'ugger' and (?) 'tugger' could not have arisen. They can scarcely have come from the Skt. ”

“ As they advanced towards the pagoda through a smooth narrow pass cut in the rock, they observed another hewn figure which was called Alexander's horse."—From an account written by Captain Pyke, on board the Stringer East Indiaman, and illd. by drawings. Read by A. Dalrymple to the Soc. of Antiquaries, 10th Feb. 1780, and pubd. in Archaeologia, vii. 323 seqq. One of the plates (xxi.) shows the elephant having on its back distinctly a small elephant, whose proboscis comes down into contact with the head of the large one. ”

“ It is supported with 42 Corinthian Pillars," &c.—Fryer, 75.
1690.—"At 3 Leagues distance from Bombay is a small Island called Elephanta, from the Statue of an Elephant cut in Stone.... Here likewise are the just dimensions of a Horse Carved in Stone, so lively ... that many have rather Fancyed it, at a distance, a living Animal.... But that which adds the most Remarkable Character to this Island, is the fam'd Pagode at the top of it ”

“ Birch in Records of the Past, vol. ii. p. 59 (no date, more shame to S. Bagster & Sons) ; and again by Ebers, revised in Z.D.M.G., 1876, pp. 391 seqq.↑ See Canon Rawlinson's Egypt, u.s.↑ For the painting see Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, edited by Birch, vol. i. pl. 11 b, which shows the Rutennu bringing a chariot and horses, a bear, an elephant, and ivory tusks, as tribute to Thotmes III. For other records see Brugsch, E.T., 2nd ed. i. ”