Elephants essays

Elephants essays This paper is on design and ancestry of elephants. The elephant was created on the fifth day of creation and since then has been able to exist in every one of earths vegetation and climate zones (Groning, 1999). The taming of the elephant was first achieved in the valley of the Indus River, where around 3500 BC the first highly advanced Oriental civilization began to emerge. There is much uncertainty however on whether the first to tame the elephant were settled farmers or forest hunting people (Groning, 1999). At this time these enormous creatures were considered as sacred beings and mystical symbols by many natural religions and cults. The elephant was tamed and trained but never domesticated and even in captivity remained a wild animal (Groning, 1999). The oldest depiction of tame elephants are small seals found during excavations in the Indus River Valley and what today is Pakistan. The seals were found in the ruined city of Mohenjo-Daro and were usually found carved in soft steatite. Evidence that they were tame is found in that they were often drawn by feeding troughs or carrying saddle-blankets (Groning, 1999). The elephant was a well-known creature in the kingdom of the pharaohs, however it was not included in mythology or in every day life. The great pharaoh Thutmose III of 1400 BC hunted the elephant for its ivory. It was later found on an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that there was a symbol of an elephant named Abu, which was found to be the explanation of the elephants tusk. The Romans derived the word ebur from this, and from the Latin we have the French word ivoire and the English word ivory (Groning, 1999). Elephants probably lived in the forests by the Yellow River during the Bronze Age and seem to have been tamed and used as a work animal during the Shang dynasty. The figure of elephants appears in many relief decorations on early ritual bronzes and also ...