I love elephants and always have. They’re huge, and generally gentle creatures with minds that are stunning in development. They have memories that rival our own and even seem to remember ancestors when they come across the remains of one.
Did you know that this name we call them goes back nearly 2,500 years? The Greeks called them elephas. It was a multi-use word meaning both ivory and elephant. Forms of it going back to Herodotus’ writing tell us that it’s likely even older, probably coming to him via the Phoenicians.
More recently, circa 1300 France, the very similar word, olyphaunt, could be heard around the country. It eventually made its way to English as elephant.
