Elephant Beauty Pageant, Chitwan District, Nepal

It appears in Middle English as olifant or olifaunt, and was borrowed from Medieval French olifanz. The French word owes something to both Old High German olbenta "camel", and to Latin elephantus "elephant", a word of Greek origin. OHG olbenta is a word of old Germanic origin; cf. Gothic ulbandus also meaning "camel". But the form of the OHG and Gothic words suggests it is also a borrowing, perhaps indeed directly or indirectly from Greek "ἐλέφας" (elephas), which in Homer only meant "ivory" but from Herodotus and on the word also referred to the animal. The earliest attested form of the word is the Mycenaean Greek e-re-pa-to, written in Linear B syllabic script.
Taxonomy and evolution
The African elephant genus contains two or, arguably, three living species; whereas the Asian elephant species is the only surviving member of the Asian elephant genus, but can be divided into four subspecies. The African and the Asian elephant diverged from a common ancestor some 7.6 million years ago.