I'm taking an class on the history of the ancient Near East, and there was an inscription that mentioned one of the Assyrian kings, I believe it was either Assurnasirpal II or his son, Shalmaneser III, had received walrus tusks as tribute, among other things. This would've been somewhere between 883 and 824 BCE. Where would something like this have come from, and how would it have arrived in the Near East?
The relevant word is nāḫiru, which has proven quite problematic. Leo Oppenheim, in his 1950 translation of the Phoenician tribute in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, translated the word as "walrus," and that translation is frequently cited today.
Assyriologists realized that the translation didn't make sense, however. Issues of geographic range aside, the word is related to the Akkadian words for "nostril," "snorting," and "spout." A whale or dolphin would make a great deal more sense, and that is exactly how the word is usually translated today.
Some dissenting scholars, however, have pointed out that nāḫiru may instead be related to nhr, the West Semitic word for river, which suggests "hippopotamus" as a translation. The tribute list notes that the ivory came from a "creature of the sea" (Akkadian binût tâmti), but people in the ancient Near East were not always very clear about distinguishing between rivers and the ocean. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary notes that another Assyrian inscription mentions that people called the nāḫiru the "horse of the sea" (sīsâ ša tâmti), which is quite close to the meaning of hippopotamus in Greek ("river-horse").
In any case, regardless of whether nāḫiru is a cetacean or a hippopotamus, it certainly isn't a walrus.