Order of the Elephant current form on 1 December 1693 by King Christian V as having only one class consisting of only 30 noble knights in addition to the Grand Master (i.e., the king) and his sons. The statutes of the order were amended in 1958 by a Royal Ordinance so that both men and women could be members of the order. The elephant and castle design derives from an elephant carrying a howdah, the familiar castle replacing the unfamiliar howdah, and finds use elsewhere in European iconography, as discussed at howdah. The Danish monarch is the head of the order. The members of
An Elephant for Aristotle taken up by the well-known Portuguese writer José Saramago, in the 2008 novel "A Viagem do Elefante" ("The Voyage of the Elephant"), though in a very different literary style from de Camp's and set in a very different time (16th Century Europe) (see ). An Elephant for Aristotle An Elephant for Aristotle, is a 1958 historical novel by American writer L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in hardback by Doubleday, and in paperback by Curtis in 1971. The first British edition was published by Dobson in 1966. The book was reissued with a new introduction by Harry Turtledove