The Year of the Elephant (Arabic: عام الفيل, ˤĀmu l-Fīl) is the name in Islamic history for the year approximately equating to 570 AD. According to Islamic tradition, it was in this year that Muhammad was born. The name is derived from an event said to have occurred at Mecca: Abraha, the Christian ruler of Yemen, which was subject to the Aksumite Empire of Ethiopia, marched upon the Kaaba with a large army, which included one or more elephants, intending to demolish it. However, the elephant is said to have stopped at the boundary around Mecca, and refused to enter. The year came to be known as the Year of the Elephant, beginning a trend for reckoning the years in the Arabian Peninsula used until it was replaced with the Islamic calendar during the rule of Umar.
Recent discoveries in southern Arabia suggest that Year of the Elephant may have been 569 or 568, as the Sassanid Empire overthrew the Axumite- and Byzantine-affiliated regimes in Yemen around 570. However, historians today believe that this event occurred at least a decade prior to the birth of Muhammad.
The year is also recorded as that of the birth of Ammar ibn Yasir.
Read more about Year Of The Elephant: Events, Other Historical Sources
Famous quotes containing the words year and/or elephant:
“In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do,—
Only—be it near to you!
For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The elephant sneezed
And fell on his knees,
And that was the end of the monk,
the monk, the monk.”
—Unknown. Animal Fair. . .
New Treasury of Children’s Poetry, A; Old Favorites and New Discoveries. Joanna Cole, comp. (1984)