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 a dark cloud of small birds named 'Ababil' () appeared. The birds carried small rocks in their beaks, and bombarded the Ethiopian forces and smashed them like "eaten straw". According to Hadith, in al-Kafi Volume one, Imam Ali was born in the 30th year of the Elephant and died in AH 40. This event is referred to in the Qur’an, in Surah 105, "Al-Fil" (, "The Elephant"), and is discussed in its related tafsir. Some scholars have placed the Year of the Elephant one or two decades earlier than 570 CE, with a tradition attributed to Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri in