Tall people are often called giants. There are cases when people grew up to about 2.5 m and more. Professional basketball teams are always happy to meet such giants.
Gigantism can cause certain abnormalities of the pituitary gland, which is responsible for growth. But such giants are usually disproportionately built, poorly developed, they have impaired coordination. Previously, such unfortunates were used in theatrical performances.
When more humane times came, doctors took over. One such giant, Fyodor Makhnov, was 275 cm tall. It is reasonable to assume that in the history of mankind, only a few have grown to 3 m.
People can sometimes grow up to almost three meters in height.
No matter how tall these people were, they weren't real giants - just big people. Giants are not people at all, they are completely different creatures that not only differ in appearance, but are also hostile to humans. Indeed, at the dawn of mankind, giants were the worst enemies of man - this is evidenced by the Old Testament and the traditions of various peoples.
The early mentions of giants in the Old Testament in the sixth chapter of Genesis are at first glance ridiculous:
“When people began to multiply on earth, and daughters were born to them, then the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and took them as their wives, whatever one chose …
Promotional video:
At that time there were giants on earth, especially since the time when the sons of God began to enter the daughters of men, and they began to give birth to them: these are strong, glorious people from ancient times.
And the Lord saw that the corruption of men on earth is great, and that all the thoughts and thoughts of their hearts were evil at all times."
Biblical commentators have debated the meaning of these words. One possible and most intriguing explanation comes from the Jewish legend of the watchmen. The story of the watchmen is not in the Bible.
Its retelling can be found in the apocrypha called "The Book of Enoch." Apocrypha - ancient documents written in. biblical style and biblical topics that were not recognized as authentic. The Book of Enoch was written in the 1st-2nd centuries. BC.
Here's what it says:
“And when the children of men began to multiply, they gave birth to beautiful daughters. And the angels, the sons of heaven, saw them and felt lust and said to one another: "Let us choose for ourselves wives from the children of men and give birth to children for ourselves."
Two hundred angels from a detachment of sleepers, or watchmen, descended to them land on Mount Hermon. Their leader was Semjaza or Azazel - unclear in the original. They not only captured their wives and "corrupted them," but taught them magic and herbal medicine. Azazel became the first weapons manufacturer and taught the art of making swords and knives to men.
Children from such a vicious union could not be blessed. Watchmen and earthly women gave birth to eternally hungry giants who set out to devour all human food.
"And when people could no longer tolerate them, the giants went against them and devoured people, began to violate the laws of birds and animals, snakes and fish, and devour their flesh and drink blood."
Soon the watchmen suffered for their sins. God sent the archangel Raphael to seize Azazel. This fallen angel was to remain in captivity until the Day of Judgment, and then burn forever in fire. The rest of the watchmen could watch as their giant children were killed, and then they, too, were captured and waited for the Day of Judgment. The man did not escape the consequences of this tragedy. From the blood of the slain giants, demons were born, who continued to torment people and keep them at bay.
Not all Jews accepted this legend, but it was well known in the early years of the Christian era and undoubtedly influenced later Christian beliefs about giants and evil. Even without knowing anything about this tradition, it is easy to establish a connection between giants and evil according to the Book of Genesis.
This is not the only place in the Bible where giants, or giants, are mentioned. After the exodus from Egypt, a group of Israelites stepped forward to survey what they considered the Promised Land. What they saw was terrible.
“And they spread a bad rumor about the land they were examining among the children of Israel … There we saw giants, the sons of Anak, from a gigantic family; and we were like locusts in our eyes before them, and we were the same in their eyes”(Numbers 13: 33-34).
These giants were known as terrible creatures, therefore "the whole society raised a cry, and the people cried all that night."
However, the giants weren't numerous. Later in the Old Testament it is said that they almost disappeared:
“For only Og; king of Bashan, remained from Rephaim. Here is his bed, a bed of iron, and now in Rabbah, among the children of Ammon: its length is nine cubits, and its width is four cubits, a man's cubits (Deut. 3:11).
By modern standards, the giant's bed was 3 m 90 cm long and almost 2 m wide. You might think that real giants could be larger, but still, the creature that needs a four-meter bed is by no means small.
Compared to Og, king of Bashan, Goliath - the most famous of the biblical giants - was much shorter.
Some tried to calculate the size of Goliath from the mentions in the Bible, and it turned out that his height was almost 3 m. He hung about 80 kg of copper equipment on himself. Goliath's height, even at the maximum tolerances, is quite reasonable. Therefore, Goliath is considered a real historical person, a big man, and not a giant. However, this big man was still known as a giant and was an enemy of Israel. So, the story of Goliath again connects giants and evil.
The Jews were not alone in believing in giants. The idea that the earth was at one time inhabited by some primitive giants was widespread. Greek mythology contains stories of two species - titans and giants - both very significant for those times when the world was just beginning. The legends of titans and giants were written relatively late, so their sources are difficult to establish. Both are described on the basis of many traditions dating back to the period of the birth of mankind. These legends, after frequent retellings, have been greatly modified.
Titans, legend says, were one of the oldest species of creatures that inhabited the earth. One of the titans, Kronos, became the father of Zeus, who ruled the gods on Olympus. However, Kronos and the other titans became enemies of God and were defeated by him.
The giants have less noble origins. According to one version, the giants arose from blood that flowed from the wound of another ancient creature. They, too, have become the gods' worst enemies. Soon after the war with the titans, Zeus set about pacifying the giants. But Zeus realized that he could not overcome the giants without the help of a mortal and called Hercules. Together with Hercules, the gods dealt with the giants. War between gods and giants is one of the most common themes in Greek literature and art.
There is no clear idea of what the giants looked like in Greek mythology. Some works of art depict them with human appearance, others as monsters with snakes for legs. Sometimes they are considered gallant warriors, worthy opponents of the gods, and sometimes they are described as stupid creatures.
German and Scandinavian mythology is richer in stories of giants. A collection of poems and legends called "Edda" tells the story of the beginning and end of the world. The first creature, according to Edda, was the giant Yamir. God One and the other gods appeared later and seem to have originated in part from giants. The gods began to _ fight the giants and killed all but one couple. She survived and gave birth to a new generation of giants who harbored hatred of the gods.
No one will get out of the final battle of the gods and giants, thus the world will die.
The Celts, who inhabited the British Isles and parts of continental Europe, also wrote many legends about giants. For example, they believed that giants lived in Britain before the Celts. They were defeated by King Brutus, who escaped the Trojan War. Gog and Magog were the last giants to survive. They were captured and forced to serve as gatekeepers at the court of Brutus in London.
In this legend, various legends are mixed. Brutus - from Roman myth, such a person never came to Britain. Gog and Magog are from the Bible, but they also associate with the northern roving tribes who invaded the Middle East in biblical times. The very idea of giants is possibly Celtic.
The giants have become part of folklore. Sometimes it was believed that they are friendly with a person and help him, although they are rather stupid. The giants were dangerous because of their size and strength, but, according to legend, even a child could outwit them.
Unfortunately, no matter how great the desire to create a magnificent theory about the now extinct giants, such an explanation is difficult to rely on.
Until two centuries ago, there seemed to be plenty of evidence. Huge bones have been found in various parts of the world. They did not belong to any of the creatures known to science, so people believed that they belonged to giants, although these findings did not belong to those giants who, according to legend, had a human appearance. Several centuries ago, people knew little about the restoration of skeletons.
There are not many large land mammals in the modern world. Many of them live in tropical regions of Asia and Africa. But 10 thousand years ago, such mammals lived in most parts of the Earth. Mammoths and other animals like elephants were especially numerous.
Our ancestors often hunted mammoths and other now extinct animals. They depicted these animals on the walls of their caves. But that was in prehistoric times. In Europe, they completely forgot that elephants once lived there. In fact, even no legends about elephant-like creatures that lived in Europe have survived.
All photos with “finds of skulls or skeletons of giants”, like this one, are Photoshop.
Maybe people have a shorter memory than myth collectors think ?! The bones found turned out to be a real mystery that had to be solved. People did not understand that an animal ever created could disappear altogether, so if the bones did not belong to any existing animal, the only possible explanation is that they belonged to giants.
This hypothesis seems to have been supported by the Bible and conventional wisdom. Why the giants died out completely, although this supposedly could not be, then no one particularly worried.
The most typical case is the giant from Lucerne. Large bones were found near this Swiss city in 1577. Scientists puzzled over them for a long time and finally brought in an expert from Basel, Dr. Felix Plater. The doctor, who knew perfectly the anatomy, declared that the bones belonged to a giant over 6 meters high. Dr. Plater even sketched this giant. Drawings and prints were made from this sketch, the giant was even depicted on the coat of arms of Lucerne. Coast and put on public display.
Centuries later, man has made significant progress in the study of anatomy and the prehistoric world. The bones were shown not to the German zoologist John Friedrich Blumenbach. He determined that they belonged to a mammoth. There are many other cases where the large bones of extinct animals have been mistakenly referred to as giants. The excavation of such bones has undoubtedly increased people's belief in giants.
Giant from Lucerne
These were not dinosaur bones, as they became extinct millions of years ago. Dinosaur bones are often buried deep in rock and are difficult to extract. The mammalian bones, however, did not last long in the ground. They are often found several meters or even half a meter above the ground, they could easily be dug up by accident or washed up during heavy rain.
Perhaps the legends about giants arose in connection with the excavation of these huge bones? With one kind of giants, maybe it happened. These are the Cyclops, monsters from early Greek legends that plagued Odysseus. Cyclops legends arose when elephant skulls were discovered in places where elephants no longer lived. The skulls had a rounded shape and were very human-like.
The two most obvious differences are, firstly, the elephant's skull is, of course, larger and, secondly, it has a hole in the middle of the forehead. It was believed that it is the eye socket of a giant; later it turned out that this is a greatly enlarged nasal opening. But for impressionable people, not too versed in elephant anatomy, the skull still belonged to a one-eyed giant.
Austrian paleontologist Otenio Abel wrote: “Navigators in Homer's time, who lost their course and found such skulls in caves on the coast of Sicily, never saw elephants. Therefore, they decided that these were the skulls of huge creatures with one eye on their forehead. So, perhaps, the myth of the one-eyed cyclops appeared. Like most other legends about giants, it is based on the finds of the bones of large mammals."
Elephant skull
We don't know exactly what the Greeks thought about the fossil elephant turtles in Homer's time, but many people saw the skull of these large extinct animals and said it belonged to the Cyclops. Greek philosopher Empedocles, who lived in the 5th century. BC, identified in the skull of an elephant the skull of Polyphemus, a Cyclops from Odysseus.
After 2000 years, Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian writer, examined another elephant skull from Sicily and also stated that it was the skull of Polyphemus. Boccaccio found that the growth of Cyclops was 90 m!
Father Atanasy Kircher, who lived in the 17th century, a German Jesuit and a famous scientist with a rich store of knowledge and an even richer imagination, also recognized in such a find the skull of Polyphemus. But, according to his calculations, the giant was only … 10 m tall.
In 1520, Magellan's ship stopped off the coast of Patagonia. For two months it was believed that the nearby lands were uninhabited, when suddenly … Let's give the floor to Pigafetta, an Italian who kept a diary of the expedition:
“Suddenly we saw a giant on the shore, almost naked. He jumped and sang and threw sand and earth on his head. The captain sent one of his subordinates there and ordered him to jump and sing as well, so that the aborigine would calm down and reassure himself of our friendliness. Moving quickly and dancing all the time, the sailor led the giant to the place where the captain was waiting for him. When he saw us, he was gripped by fear and surprise. Believing that we had descended from the sky, he kept pointing his finger up. He was a giant, so that even the most representative of us reached him only to the waist, in addition, he was well built, with a very large face, painted with red paint."
It is easy to deduce from this message that Magellan's team met with a 3.5 meter tall man. And he, in turn, took them for creatures that had flown from the sky, because he was waiting for them.
Is this the key? After all, the appearance and disappearance of giants happened suddenly, leaving no evolutionary traces on Earth. The conclusion involuntarily suggests itself that the giants are not earthlings. And that they were brought to our planet for a short time …
