EvidenceDocumentedThe texts are real and quoted from the linked translations. No verified giant human skeleton exists; fossil bones of large animals are a documented source for ancient giant beliefs.What this means
Primary records exist: an original document, a published text, an official file or a dated report. We link to them. This level says the record exists and what it says, not that every claim in it is true.
Genesis has the Nephilim, Greece has the Giants, the North has the frost giants, Arabia has the tall people of 'Ad and the Maya have Zipacna, who piled up mountains. Why does almost everyone remember giants?
Many ancient traditions say the world once belonged to bigger, stronger beings, and that humans came after them or had to fight them. Genesis says there were giants in the earth in those days. The Book of Enoch makes them the children of fallen angels. Israel's scouts report giants in Canaan. Greek myth has the Giants born of Earth who threw rocks at the sky, and Hesiod's race of bronze, great in strength. Norse myth starts with the frost giants. The Quran reminds the people of 'Ad that God gave them growth of stature.
The story is not identical everywhere. Sometimes the giants are monsters, sometimes ancestors, sometimes a defeated older people. But the pattern of an earlier race, larger than us, wiped out or driven away, shows up again and again. The versions below are quoted from public-domain translations.
Composed c. 600-400 BCE; Dead Sea Scroll fragments c. 250 BCE to 50 CE
From the text
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
Same and different: The giants (Hebrew nephilim) are born before the Flood from the sons of God and human women; Genesis gives no size and no further story, which other texts fill in.
Composed c. 300-200 BCE; Aramaic fragments at Qumran from c. 200-150 BCE
From the text
And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, The giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
Compiled 1st or 2nd century CE from older myth; medieval manuscripts
From the text
But Earth, vexed on account of the Titans, brought forth the giants, whom she had by Sky. These were matchless in the bulk of their bodies and invincible in their might ... And they darted rocks and burning oaks at the sky.
Same and different: Same idea of huge, violent beings from before the present order; different: they are children of Earth and Sky who attack the gods, and are beaten with the help of a mortal, Heracles.
Zeus the Father made a third generation of mortal men, a brazen race, sprung from ash-trees; and it was in no way equal to the silver age, but was terrible and strong. ... Great was their strength and unconquerable the arms which grew from their shoulders on their strong limbs.
Prose Edda, Gylfaginning (Ymir and the frost giants)
Where
Iceland
When
Written c. 1220 CE; manuscripts from c. 1300
From the text
The sons of Bor slew the giant Ymer, but when he fell, there flowed so much blood from his wounds that they drowned therein the whole race of frost giants; excepting one, who escaped with his household.
Same and different: Same giants-first order and a flood that kills them; different: the giants are the first beings of all, older than the gods, and the world is made from Ymir's body.
Same and different: Same post-Flood people of great size (later commentators made them literal giants) destroyed for arrogance; different: they are humans warned by a prophet, Hud, not hybrids.
His two sons, Zipacna and Cabrakan (earth-heaper (?) and earthquake), were daily employed, the one in heaping up mountains, and the other in demolishing them, and these also incurred the wrath of the immortals.
Same and different: Same pattern of proud, mountain-sized beings who live before the present age and are killed by heroes (the Hero Twins); different: they are tied to earthquakes and mountains rather than to fallen angels.
Scholars give several reasons why giants appear almost everywhere. The first is real bones. The historian Adrienne Mayor showed in The First Fossil Hunters (2000) that Greeks and Romans dug up mammoth and other large fossil bones and displayed them as the bones of giants and heroes; similar finds were made worldwide. The second is real ruins: walls built of huge stones by earlier peoples were often said to be the work of giants (the Greeks called such walls Cyclopean). The third is the widespread belief that earlier ages were greater and that history is a decline, so the people before us must have been bigger and lived longer. Within the Bible the stories are connected directly: 1 Enoch expands Genesis 6, and Numbers and Deuteronomy use giant names (Anakim, Rephaim, Emim) for older peoples of Canaan. Some scholars also see Mesopotamian influence, since Gilgamesh is described as a giant in the QumranBook of Giants. Across distant cultures, though, there is no evidence of one shared source; the overlap is best explained by similar evidence (bones and ruins) and similar ways of thinking about the past. No skeleton of a human giant has ever been verified.
Sources
WikipediaA free online encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers. It is a good starting point and usually lists its own sources, but anyone can change it, so we treat it as a guide to better sources, not the final word.Wikipedia, 'Giant' (survey of giants in world mythology with citations)Reference