Al-Naqqāsh relates in his Tafsīr that a flood swept away their corpses and hurled them into the sea.

Al-Suhaylī remarks that the affair of the Elephant took place in the month of Muḥarram, in the year 886 according to the reckoning of Dhū ʼl-Qarnayn.

I add: In that very year—according to the widely held view—the Messenger of God (peace and blessings be upon him) was born. Some maintain that the event occurred several years before his birth, as we shall mention, God willing, and that opinion is also sound.

Ibn Isḥāq then quoted the verses composed by the Arabs about this momentous incident in which God gave victory to His Sacred House—a House He intended to honor, exalt, purify, and revere through the mission of Muḥammad (peace and blessings be upon him) and through the upright religion he would establish, whose pillars include—indeed whose mainstay is—the prayer, and whose qiblah God would make this sanctified Kaʿbah. What God did to the People of the Elephant was not a triumph granted to Quraysh over the Christian Abyssinians, for at that time the Abyssinians were nearer to the truth than the idol-worshipping Quraysh. Rather, the victory was for the Sacred House itself and served as a portent and preparation for the sending of Muḥammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

Among the poems composed on the occasion is the piece recited by ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zibʿarā al-Sahmī:

Turn back from the valley of Mecca—for its sanctuary
From ancient times has never been assailed.

When first its nights were declared inviolate,
Sirius itself had not yet been created,
Nor has any mighty mortal ever dared approach it.

Ask the king of Abyssinia what he witnessed there;
One who knows will inform the ignorant.

Sixty thousand never reached their land again—
Not even the sick among them survived the retreat.

ʿĀd and Jurhum dwelt there before them,
And God, exalted above His servants, still preserves it.