How odd: we owe the oldest attestation of
mammotovoy (old Russian adjective from
mam[m]ot, used to describe mammoth ivory) to an English
diplomatic report from the 1690s (see NED). BTW, the NED entry for
mammoth provides an obsolete (19th c.) spelling (in
Cyrillic) of the Russian mammoth word, incorrectly transliterated by the
compilers of the American Heritage Dictionary, who probably took NED as the
final authority on what the Russian word was.
In the 19th century Russia exported about 20000 kg of Siberian
mammoth ivory (odontolite) a year? Fossil ivory is usually bluish from
saturation by metallic salts. As recently as in the 1930s about 190 pairs of
tusks a year were shipped abroad from Soviet Yakutia (now Sakha).
The last surviving mammoths lingered on into PIE times in a
few isolated spots like Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, but Siberia must
have abounded in well-preserved carcasses. Especially in the spring, as swollen
rivers undercut and ripped away
large chunks of material from their banks, huge furry critters
popped out of the frozen soil.
Questions: How old is the mammoth ivory trade? Have any
post-Ice-Age odontolite ivories been found in Europe or in southern Eurasia?
Could the IEs be familiar with mammoth ivory?
Piotr