It was the general belief among the ancients, and indeed the moderns, till a very recent period, that giant races of men once inhabited the earth. In the Book of Genesis we are told that “there were giants in the earth in those days,” and that they were produced as a sort of demi-god by the marriage of the sons of God with the fairest daughters of men (Gen. vi, 4). When Moses sent out spies to explore the country of the Canaanites they reported that they had seen the children of Anak, who were giants, and in whose presence they were but grass-hoppers. In Deut. ii, 10-21, we read of the Emins “great and many, and as tall as the Anakims.” In chapter three, verse eleven, of the same book, we learn that “only Og, King of Bashan, remained of the remnant of giants; behold his bedstead was of iron, nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it.” According to Bishop Cumberland the cubit was 21 inches, so that the length of the bedstead was 15 feet, and its breadth 7 feet 8 inches. Goliath was six cubits and a span in height, or 11 feet 3 inches. Beniah, one of David’s captains, killed an Egyptian who was 5 cubits in stature, that is 8 feet 9 inches.
Historical Giants
Profane historians have given 9 feet as the height of Hercules, their first hero, while Orestes, according to the Greeks, was 11 feet 6 inches. The giant Galbara brought from Arabia to Rome under Claudius Caesar was nearly ten feet high, and the bones of Secondella and Pusio, keepers of the gardens of Sallust, were but six inches shorter. The Roman emperor Maximinus was nine feet high, and several persons are mentioned as of the same height in the reign of Augustus. Goropius, in the 17th century saw a girl who was ten feet high, and Funnam, a Scotchman, who lived in the time of one of the ancient Kings of Scotland, measured eleven feet, six inches. The giant Ferrargus, slain by Orlando, nephew of Charlemagne, figures as having been eighteen feet high.
Unearthed Giant Skeletons
Among the tales of Strabo and Pliny are descriptions of the skeletons of giants found in the mountains of Crete, the former 60 cubits high (106 feet), and the latter 46 cubits (95 feet). Another, 60 cubits, was found near Tangier, according to Plutarch; this was supposed to be that of Anteus. The skeleton of Pallas, the son of Evander, found in Rome, is said to have been taller than the walls of that city. One found in England in 1711 is alleged to have been fifty feet long. Rioland, a celebrated anatomist, who wrote in 1614, says that some years before there was to be seen in the suburbs of St. Germain a tomb of the giant Isoret, who was twenty feet high.
In Rouen, in 1509, in digging in the ditches near the Dominicans they found a stone tomb containing a skeleton “whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whose shin bone reached up to the girdle of the tallest man, being about 4 feet long;” therefore, the body must have been about 17 feet high. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper on which was engraved “in this tomb lies the noble and powerful lord, the Chevalier Ricon de Vallemont, and his bones.” Valence in Dauphiny boasts of possessing the bones of the giant Bucart, the tyrant of the Varvarais who was slain by an arrow by the Count De Cabillon his vassal. The Dominicans had a part of the shin bone with the articulation of the knee and his person painted in fresco, with an inscription showing that this giant was 22 feet 6 inches high and that his bones were found in 1705, near the banks of the Morderi, a little river at the foot of the mountain of Crussal, upon which, tradition says, that giant lived.
Tales of Giant Tombs
Then there is the story how, on Jan. 11th, 1613, some masons digging near the ruins of a castle in Dauphiny, in a field which had long been called “the Giant’s Field” at the depth of 18 feet, discovered a brick tomb 30 feet long, 12 feet wide and 8 feet high, on which was a gray stone with the words Theutolochus Rex cut thereon; when the tomb was opened they found a human skeleton entire 25 feet 6 inches long, 10 feet wide across the shoulders, and 5 feet deep from the breast bone to the back. His teeth were each the size of an ox’s foot and his shin bone measured four feet. Near Mazarino, in Sicily, in 1516 was found the skeleton of a giant 30 feet high. His head was the size of a hogshead and each of his teeth weighed five ounces.
Skeptics and Misinterpretations
The above are quoted from historians who are generally accepted as reliable. Except those found in tombs the greater number of skeletons were no doubt those of the elephant and whale. To prove that giants existed before the flood, St. Austin cites an enormous tooth which he saw on the shores of Utica, which was subsequently proved to have belonged to a mastodon. The tooth in the church of St. Christopher at Hispulla and the shoulder bone of the same saint, preserved in a church at Venice, are of the same origin, so is the immense tooth preserved and shown at Antwerp. Another of a similar kind, dug up with a skeleton near Tunis in 1630, which had been sent to the learned Pieresc, was pronounced to be the grinder of an elephant. It is a curious fact that Buffon in his great work has figured and described the bones of an elephant as human remains.
Prehistoric Giants or Misunderstood Fossils?
It is argued by some that if great monsters once lived on the earth, such as the deinotherium, which was a monstrous elephant, the iguanadon, a lizard, which stood 12 feet high and was 70 feet in length; the pterodactylus, a flying crocodile, whose wings expanded to the breadth of 27 feet, the ichthyosaurus, the plesiosaurus, and others whose remains are found in the beds of the Oolitic age, may not human beings in the past have attained gigantic proportions?
Anthropological Evidence
On the contrary it is found that by inspecting the mummies of ancient Egypt, which have very recently been exhumed, and whose forms when living moved on the earth three thousand years ago, that the ancient peoples were not as tell as the Canadian of Anglo-Saxon origin, and to the same effect may be adduced the size of ancient armor, architectural dimensions and the measures of length taken from the human form, and which have been transmitted to us from antiquity. So the ladies of Philadelphia are taller than was Thermuthis, who took Moses from his cradle of bulrushes, and the ladies of Ottawa and Toronto as handsome and taller than the daughters of the great Pharaohs, who thousands of years ago built their pyramids and palaces on the banks of the Nile.
The Ottawa Journal • Saturday, September 03, 1887
Disclaimer: The article has been slightly altered to improve readability; however, the original content remains unchanged.
