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 to Khiva, by an enterprising Arabian traveller, Abou-el-Cassim, in the middle of the tenth century, applies to the mammoth ivory from the old Bulgaria on the Lower Volga.
We learn from the recent researches of M. Chabas that an elephant was living in the valley of the Euphrates in the sixteenth century B.C., 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. This important notice 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. Those hunted may have been either the fossil (E. armeniacus) Armenian, or the Indian species.[1] On taking a survey of the whole evidence as to the range of the mammoth
- ↑ Chabas, Études sur l'Antiquité historique d'après les sources égyptiennes, 2d edit., p. 124. It must be remarked that this notice stands alone, and is as yet not confirmed by any Assyrian or Babylonian records.
