ἐλέφας

The Greek word elephas (ἐλέφας) meant both 'ivory' and 'elephant.' Which meaning came first is the question. Most linguists believe the ivory sense was older. The Greeks encountered elephant ivory through Phoenician trade networks long before they saw a living elephant. The word likely entered Greek from a Semitic or North African source — possibly related to Hebrew eleph ('ox,' a large animal) or Egyptian ābu ('ivory, elephant').

The first Greek to describe elephants from observation was Ctesias of Cnidus, a physician at the Persian court around 400 BCE. But it was Alexander the Great's campaign in India (327-325 BCE) that brought Greeks face to face with war elephants. At the Battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BCE, Alexander fought King Porus's force of 200 elephants. The encounter transformed the Greek imagination. Suddenly the ivory supplier had a body, a temperament, and a military application.

Latin borrowed elephas as elephantus. Pliny the Elder devoted chapters of his Natural History (77 CE) to elephants, calling them the closest to humans in intelligence. Hannibal's crossing of the Alps with 37 war elephants in 218 BCE had already made the animal legendary in Roman culture. The word passed through Latin into every European language essentially unchanged.

The double meaning — ivory and animal — persisted in Greek for centuries but collapsed in the daughter languages. English 'elephant' means only the animal. 'Ivory' comes from a different path entirely, through Latin ebur. The split happened so long ago that most English speakers have no idea their word for the largest land animal was originally a word for the material of its teeth.