What knowledge did the Minoans have of elephants? Phaistos graters and Zakros tusks

The present study is based on two observations: the presence of a type of Minoan vessel at Phaistos and Agia Triada, and the elephant tusks found in the storeroom of the Palace of Zakros, three sites in Crete. The examination of these objects allowed us to develop two hypotheses. The first concerns the cups called “grater”, which include inside an element that served as rasp. The shape and surface of the rasp are surprisingly reminiscent of the outline and the design of the masticatory surface of elephant molars. This led us to revisit the fossil elephants of this island and to look for the degree of similarity between the elephant molars and the design of some rasps from Phaistos and Agia Triada, dating from c. 1800-1700 BC. The second hypothesis relates to the provenance of elephant ivory, used in Crete from c. 1600 BC to manufacture many precious objects (seals, plaques, figurines, statuettes, etc.), based on the raw elephant tusks found in a storeroom at Zakros, and dated to 1500-1450 BC. The morphological comparison of these tusks with those of fossil elephants from Crete and the extant species from Asia and Africa, as well as the examination of palaeontological, archaeological, iconographic and epigraphic data, allow us to suggest the attribution of the tusks of Zakros to Ele­phas maximus Linnaeus, 1758 which lived in the Levant until around 1200 BC. This affinity would deserve to be supported by microstructural and isotopic analyses.