Oliphant

Oliphant is the name for a specific type of large horn made from a single hollowed piece of elephant ivory. Because of ivory's extraordinary durability, oliphants are one of the rare instruments that survive from the medieval era. As such, they are an important record of medieval instruments as well as iconographic types that may have been common on other objects that no longer survive.

Oliphants were often decorated with elaborate carvings and fitted with two horizontal bands of metal at each end that attached to a leather strap, allowing the instrument to be worn slung around the body. Given the high value of ivory in the medieval period and the fine artistry of the ivory carvings, these objects were often associated with iconography of the royal hunt and courtly life. Common decorations include roundels with animals and hunters as well as vegetal motifs and abstract patterns. While some scholars believe that these were used as hunting horns, others have suggested that they were largely reserved for display as luxury objects since their heavy weight, cumbersome size, and high value would have made them less practical than other hunting horns.

Though surviving oliphants are largely preserved in European church treasuries and modern museums, oliphants were largely produced in Fatimid Egypt and Southern Italy, and made of African elephant ivory traded through North Africa. This foreign provenance, as well as the popular association of oliphants with the Song of Roland and the army of Charlemagne, contributed to a perception of oliphants as exotic objects. An oliphant legendarily believed to be given to Charlemagne from the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid is preserved at the treasury of Aachen, for example.

See: Shalem, Avinoam. The Oliphant: Islamic Objects in Historical Context. Leiden: Brill, 2004.