Elephant's tooth
PRESCRIBED SOURCE
DESCRIPTION
Single elephant tooth (Elephas maximus), fifth right upper molar; face 190mm x 80mm; depth 190mm.
Provenance. From the Tradescant Collection; originally in the Ashmolean Museum; subsequently transferred to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History; lent in 2002 to the Museum of the History of Science (inventory no. 35483).
Location. Currently in "The Ashmolean Museum" display case, Top Gallery, Museum of the History of Science, along with the following natural historical specimens: (1) Curving horns of capra sibirica, (2) Snout of sawfish, (3) Crocodile hide, (4) Turtle head, and (5) Clypeus ploti fossil.
COMMENTARY
Ancient depictions and descriptions. Elephants were of course documented in classical literary sources -- ranging from accounts of Hannibal's invasion to Pliny's natural history -- and also depicted on ancient coins. But the further Europeans got from the actual experience of these remarkable creatures, the more they undestood them in a metaphorical and symbolic manner. Amongst pagans, elephants were celebrated for their strength and intelligence, and regarded as symbols of triumph and fame. For early Christians, their supposed absence of carnal desire made them symbols of Adam and Even before the Fall. The belief that they always ate the same amount of food also transformed them into symbols of temperance.
Medieval transformations. Due partly to these symbolic associations, illustrations of elephants proliferated long after living elephants disappeared from Western Europe. But because they needed to rely on previous illustrations and written descriptions, these illustrations drifted further and further from actual morphology, until the elephant had become perhaps the strangest and most amophous beast in the typical medieval bestiary. The result was a form of 'knowledge' which mixed biological fact with literary 'legend' in the strict sense, that is, with traditions passed down in writing, and above all in Latin, the universal language of learning.
First-hand encounters. This background is useful in considering the impact of this particular elephant's tooth on the English men, women, and children who handled it in the seventeenth century. We know that the Tradescants opened their Ark to visitors upon payment of a fee. The same applied in the early Ashmolean, where visitors were allowed to handle the objects themselves: 'Even women are allowed up here for sixpence', the Frankfurt patrician, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach complained in 1710: 'they run here and there, grabbing at everything and taking no rebuff from the Sub-Custos.’* Some of the damage caused in this way can still be seen today.
A challenge to established learning. What then was the sifgnificance of a first-hand encounter with this remarkable object? Here was a tooth, similar in material and in texture to one's own, but massively different in size, shape, and weight. The simple experience of handling this object must have dumbfounded the learned moralist: what possible relationship could the brute fact of this mammoth tooth have with the moral tales and spiritual allegories of medieval legend? It silenced the student of natural philosophy as well: what bearing did abstract generalisations about prime matter, privation, form and substance, taught nearby in the Schools Quadrangle, have on natural historical particulars of this kind? To be sure, the experience dumbfounded the ordinary, unlearned person as well. In this regard, a direct encounter with the elephant's tooth acted as a momentary equaliser: it demonstrated -- to scholar and lay person alike -- that this legendary beast actually existed; but it also suggested that the search for real knowledge of it must begin again de novo, and by means of direct empirical observation rather than even the most ponderous book-learning. Small wonder, then, that some Oxford scholars attempted to dismiss the Ashmolean Museum as a mere 'nicknackatory': the very existence of Tradescant's collection of natural historical curiosities was a challenge to the hegemony over learning of the great repository of books just a few yards away.
CREDITS
Commentary inspired by an essay by Rebecca Hamilton (third-year student, Jesus College), December 2016; Howard Hotson, March 2021.
3D photogrammetry by Jamie Cameron, September 2016
Reference: W.H.Quarrel and W.J.C. Quarrel (eds.), Oxford in 1710 from the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (Oxford, 1928), p. 31.