In the old testament, Noah is ordered by God to take a couple of each
living animal on his ark.  I wanted to know if, in the location where
the story was created, it was known that there existed such strange
animals as elephants and giraffes.

Elephants and giraffes are strange?

Welcome to earth. :)

Noah's Ark is just a myth, so you can populate it with any animals you
like even if in real life they might eat each other.

The animals were sent to Noah. The story is credited as being written
by Moses. Who came out of Egypt a very rich and powerful kingdom in
his time. I would think that Moses knew about these two strange
animals as well as others.

If Noah didn,t know about them he certainly did when they came to him.

If you believe in the whole Noah and his Ark. Then it stands to reason
that if God flooded everywhere, and the flood would have killed
everything. So there must have elephants and giraffes on the Ark as
well to have survived. Anyways there are elephants and giraffes in
Afica after all.

Incidentally, in relation to probonopublico's comment about animals
possibly eating each other, everybody thinks of the animals as going
in "two by two"; but in fact God commanded Noah to take in the "clean"
beasts by "sevens, the male and the female" and only the "not clean"
by two. Presumably, "clean" meant animals fit to eat (ie Kosher -
though the rules had not yet been laid down in Noah's time), so
perhaps the extra 5 clean beasts were intended as food for Noah, his
family and the carnivorous animals.

So the 'clean' ones went in sevens?

This fable gets even more ridiculous: the Ark simply wasn't big enough
to hold so many live animals.

What's more the technology didn't even exist to build a sea-going
vessel big enough to house and feed so many animals.

elepahant were possibly in the area  but giraffes were probably not.
But joe916 has the right idea.

Of course there were.  The real question is how the giraffes wandered
from Mt. Ararat back to Africa without leaving any relatives on the
way, ditto for the elephants, who obviously wandered both east and
southwest, settling in Southasia and resettling in Africa.

To prove Biblical references and occurrences is to deny faith and
without faith there is no God. Y'all best be careful in your arguments
or we'll wink out of existence, though the fact that we aren't
disappearing can be construed as proof and will thus cause us to
disappear...

Uh oh.

There were definitely giraffes and elephants, as well as crocodiles,
lions etc. For proof, see 
http://www.abctoys.co.uk/sotn/dprod.php?products_id=130&xClient=250b290d22197c5dc740b157351f2405

Yes. And god's rules do not change. He created animals ' according to
their kind' and wouldf have preserved them the same way. Genesis 1;21
And God proceeded to create the great sea monsters and every living
soul that moves about, which the waters swarmed forth according to
their kinds, and every winged flying creature according to its kind.
And God got to see that [it was] good.