A wooly mammoth. A photograph of a model on display at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria. A large, hairy elephant-like creature with enormous tusks.
4 November 2022
[5 November: made corrections to the discussion of Mansi in the second paragraph]
The mammoth is any of a number of extinct species of the genus Mammuthus in the order Proboscidea, an order whose only surviving members are the elephants. Temporally, the mammoth ranged from the Pliocene (some five million years ago) into our current epoch, the Holocene, as recently as some 4,000 years ago. Geographically, early mammoth fossils have been found in Africa, but for most of its existence the mammoth ranged across Eurasia and North America. Mammoth is also an adjective for anything large.
The name mammoth probably originates in a Mansi dialect from the compound *mēmoŋt, meaning earth-horn, a reference to the animal’s tusks. The word in present-day Mansi is maxar (earth-stag). Mansi, formerly known as Vogul, is a group of Uralic languages spoken in Siberia. The Uralic family is a grouping of non-Indo-European languages that includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. The Mansi word was borrowed into Russian in the late sixteenth century as the word mamant (modern spelling mamont), and from there into English and other Western European languages in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The loss of the / n / and the gain of / θ / in these Western European languages is unexplained but may have been influenced by the pronunciation of behemoth.
The Russian word starts making its way into English in the early seventeenth century, but at first only as mentions of the Russian word rather than as Anglicized use. For instance, Richard Finch, a member of an expedition to Siberia on behalf of the London-based Muscovy company, wrote the following in August 1611 in a letter to his corporate masters:
Likewise being at Pechora, Oust Zilma, or any of those parts, there is in the Winter time to bee had among the Samoyeds, Elephants teeth, which they sell in pieces according as they get it, and not by weight. And I haue beene told, they sell the same at a very small rate. It is called in Russe, Mamanta Kaost.
The word appears in a Russian-English lexicon in 1618, but only as a Russian word. English scholar Richard James traveled to Russia in that year, and his notes include the first Russian-English dictionary, which included this entry, which references an old Siberian legend that has the mammoth dwelling underground, a giant mole of sorts, an explanation for why its remains are found buried:
maimanto, as they say a sea eleφant, which is never seene, but accordinge to the Samȣtes he workes himself under grownde and so they finde his teeth or hornes or bones in Pechore and Nova Zemla, of which they make table men in Russia.
(Samȣtes is a reference to the Samoyed people. A table man is a piece or counter used in a game, such as a chess piece.)
Such early references to the Russian word, found in obscure sources, do not appear to have influenced later adoption of mammoth into English.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the word was being used in English but with Russian inflections. From a 1698 translation of Henry William Ludolf’s Some Curious Observations Concerning the Products of Russia:
The Mammotovoy, which is dug out of the Earth in Siberia, is very well worth taking notice of. The common People in Russia relate surprising things concerning its Origin. For they say, they are the Bones of certain Animals, which exceed in bigness any living Creature upon Earth; They make use of it in Physick, as we do of the Unicorn. A friend of mine presented me with a piece of it, which he said was given him by a Muscovite, who had brought it himself out of Siberia, which appears to me to be nothing else than a true Ivory. The more understanding Sort believe them to be Elephants Teeth, which ever since the time of the Deluge, have lain thus under ground.
But by the beginning of the eighteenth century we see mammoth being fully Anglicized. From a translation from the Dutch of E. Ysbrants Ides’s 1706 Three Years Travels from Moscow Over-Land to China:
But the old Siberian Russians affirm that the Mammuth is very like the Elephant; with this only difference, that the Teeth of the former are firmer, and not so straight as those of the latter. They also are of Opinion, that there were Elephants in this Country before the Deluge, when this Climate was warmer, and that their drowned bodies floating on the surface of the Water of that Flood, were at last wash’d and forced into Subterranean Cavities: But that after this Noachian Deluge the Air which was before warm was changed to cold, and that these Bones have lain frozen in the Earth ever since, and so are preserved from putrefaction till they thaw, and come to light; which is no very unreasonable conjecture.
The adjectival use of mammoth to refer to something that is large is in place by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thomas Jefferson uses it to refer to a side of veal in two letters of 22 October 1801. In one, he thanks the senders of the meat:
I recieved [sic] on the 20th. your favor of the 17th. and this morning arrived the quarter you were so kind as to send me of the Mammoth-veal. tho’ so far advanced as to be condemned for the table, yet it retained all the beauty of it’s appearance, it’s fatness & enormous size. a repetition of such successful examples of enlarging the animal volume will do more towards correcting the erroneous opinions of European writers as to the effect of our climate on the size of animals, than any thing I have been able to do.
In the second, he notes the “Mammoth-veal” weighed 438 pounds.
One of the impetuses of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803–06) was to combat the idea, common in Europe at the time, that American species were diminutive versions of European ones. Jefferson, enchanted by the finds of mammoth fossils in Russia, hoped the expedition would find living mammoths in the American west. Needless to say, while mammoth fossils can be found in North America, Lewis and Clark did not find any, much less any living specimens of the creature, but this hope may explain Jefferson’s preoccupation with the word.
Sources:
James, Richard. Русско-Английскийй Словарь (Russko-Angliĭskiĭ Slovarʹ; Russian-English Dictionary) (1618–19). Leningrad: Leningrad University, 1959, 181–82.
Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to John Beckley, 22 October 1801. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to Michael Fry and Nathan Coleman, 22 October 1801. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.
Ides, E. Ysbrants. Three Years Travels from Moscow Over-Land to China. London: W. Freeman, et al., 1706, 26. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Ludolf, Henry William. Some Curious Observations Concerning the Products of Russia. Translated from Latin and included as a supplement to Adam Brand. A Journal of the Embassy from their Majesties John and Peter Alexievitz, Emperors of Muscovy, &c. Over Land into China. London: D. Brown and T. Goodwin, 1698, 122–23. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Merriam-Webster.com, 4 October 2022, s.v. mammoth, n. and adj.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2000, s.v. mammoth, n. and adj.
Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 3 of 5. London: William Stansby for Henrie Fetherstone, 1625, 537–38. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Photo credit: Flying Puffin, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.