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
Year of the Elephant as 'Mahmud' (, consonant letters: m-ħ-m-d), is said to have stopped at the boundary around Mecca, and refused to enter. It has been theorized that an epidemic, perhaps caused by smallpox, could have caused such a failed invasion of Mecca. The year came to be known as the Year of the Elephant, beginning a trend for reckoning the years in the Arabian Peninsula. This reckoning was used until it was replaced with the Islamic calendar during the times of ‘Umar. Archaeological discoveries in Southern Arabia suggest that Year of the Elephant may have been 569 or 568, as the Sasanian