the exceptionally warm season of 1846[1], the mammoth discovered by Lieut. Benkendorf on the banks of the Indigirka was thawed out of the tundra until it was revealed to the astonished eyes of the beholder, standing on its feet in the position in which it had been bogged. Had any elks or reindeer been in that spot at that time they might have been entombed in the same way, and preserved by the frosts of the winter till they were liberated again by the rare chance of their place of sepulture being invaded by warm floods from the south. The thaw in that year proceeded so rapidly that Lieut. Benkendorf and his Cossacks narrowly escaped the alternative of being entombed in the soft morass, or of being swept out northwards into the Arctic Sea, as his mammoth was, to join the vast assembly of mammoths and reindeer and other animals which have been swept down in a similar fashion.
The remains of the animal occur throughout Russian Asia; and the singular notice of fossil ivory being brought for sale at Khiva, by an enterprising Arabian traveller, Abou-el-Cassim, in the middle of the tenth century, applies to the mammoth from the old Bulgaria on the Lower Volga[2].
Nor is a variety of the mammoth absent from Asia Minor, since the remains of an elephant (E. armeniacus), discovered near Erzeroum, have been determined by Dr. Falconer to be intermediate between the mammoth and the Indian elephant. And it is an interesting fact to note that in Asia Minor, as in the Pleistocene of Europe, it is associated with the horse, stag, bison, and woolly (?) rhinoceros, all of which are described by Dr. Brandt from Persia in 1870.
The elephant[3] was living in the valley of the Euphrates in the sixteenth century before Christ, when that district was invaded by the Egyptians, since a great hunting of elephants by the Pharaoh, Thothmes III., in the neighbourhood of Nineveh, has been recorded in an Egyptian inscription published by M. Chabas. This important discovery brings Elephas armeniacus into the same geographical region as the Indian elephant (whichever variety or species those in question may have been), and shows that the fossil and living elephants of Asia in ancient times were not separated from each other by impassable geographical barriers or wide spaces of mountain and desert.
- ↑ Middendorf, 'Sibirische Reise,' iv. 'Die Thierwelt Sibiriens,' p. 1082. 4to. 1867. This account is translated in my essay on the "Range of the Mammoth" quoted above.
- ↑ 'Les Peuples du Caucase, ou Voyage d'Abou-el-Cassim,' par M. C. D'Ohsson, page 80. "On trouve souvent dans la Boulgarie des os (fossiles) d'une grandeur prodigieuse. J'ai vu une dent qui avait deux palmes de large sur quatre de long, et un crâne qui ressemblait a une hutte (arabe). On y déterre des dents semblables aux défenses d'éléphants, blanche comme la neige et pesant jusqu' à deux cents menns. On ne sait pas à quel animal elles ont appartenu, mais on les transporte dans le Khoragur (Kiva), où elles se vendent à grand prix. On en fait des peignes, des vases et d'autres objets, comme on façonne l'ivoire; toutefois cette substance est plus dure que l'ivoire; jamais elle ne se brise."
This is extracted by the learned D'Ohsson from an Arabic manuscript of the middle of the tenth century.
- ↑ Chabas, 'Études sur l'Antiquité Historique d'apres les sources égyptiennes,' 2nd edit. p. 124.
