The History of the World

Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Giants and Great Doors — The Texts, the Reports, the Bones, and the Wicket

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s history research, standing on its own website. Cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: DOCUMENTED · TRADITION · DEBATED · OWNER'S TEACHING. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. The layers must not blur, and keeping them separate is the lesson: the texts read as text (§2), the reports read at measure (§5), the bones read as bones that were re-read to their species (§7) — and no layer is used to settle another, in either direction. Teach the measuring rule of §1 before any exhibit is shown, and let students apply it themselves. The wicket (§3.4) is the class's centre: when a claim is made from a building's size, the first question is what the building itself says its users' size was. Verdicts on the claims examined stand inline, at their classes, where the research file places them; there is no separate list of the rejected on this page.

§1 — HOW TO MEASURE A PICTURE

DOCUMENTED — the method. A measurement taken from a picture is only as good as three things. (1) A reference of known size in the same plane as the thing measured: a figure standing nearer the camera than the doorway behind it will tower over the doorway in the picture while standing an ordinary height in the world; without a known object at the figure's own distance — a standard door leaf, a stair riser, a person of recorded height — there is nothing to measure against. (2) Unmanipulated provenance: the image must descend from a checkable original — a negative, a file, a dated publication — so that enlargement, compositing and retouching can be excluded. (3) A checkable original: someone other than the claimant must be able to retrieve the same image and repeat the measurement. A grained, sourceless image, with no reference in its plane and no original to check, yields no measurement at all — not a large one, not a small one.

DOCUMENTED — the true ruler. The same standard is the one by which real extreme stature is known. The tallest human being ever medically verified stood 8 feet 11 inches (2.72 m) — an American man of the early 20th century, measured repeatedly by named physicians, in the open, photographed throughout his life beside ordinary doors, chairs and doorways, which he genuinely dwarfs. His stature was a medical condition, his skeleton is preserved, and his measurements were never in dispute because they were taken on his body, by named measurers. That is what evidence of a giant looks like when it exists. It looks like that.

DOCUMENTED — the genre's most-circulated photograph. The single most reproduced “giant skeleton” photograph of the internet age — an enormous human skeleton in an excavation pit, a workman kneeling at its skull — is documented to its origin: it was made in 2002 as an entry in a digital-art contest whose brief was, in terms, to fabricate an archaeological discovery convincing enough to pass. Its maker composited a human skeleton into an aerial photograph of a real mastodon excavation in New York State; the picture took a prize, escaped its context, and was thereafter published — in newspapers as well as posts — as a genuine find in India, in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. The contest page, the maker, and the source photograph all stand in the open record. The image is not old, not suppressed, and not a photograph of a skeleton.

§2 — THE TEXTS, AS TEXT

DOCUMENTED — as text. Giants stand in the canon as text, and this class enters them as text and argues nothing about them. Genesis 6 speaks of the Nephilim, “the mighty men that were of old,” in the days when the sons of the divine took wives from the daughters of men. Deuteronomy 3:11 gives the one measured giant of the corpus: Og king of Bashan, last of the Rephaim, whose bedstead — a bedstead of iron, kept at Rabbah — is given at nine cubits long and four cubits wide, on the order of thirteen and a half feet by six. The Rephaim recur through the historical books as a people of great stature dispossessed before Israel. The Book of Enoch, in the owner's collection, carries the giants to their source: the offspring of the Watchers who descended, whose hunger and violence bring the judgement of the Flood.

TEXT — the register kept. These stand in the owner's books, in the text register. This class's geology and photography decide nothing about them, in either direction — and nothing in the sections that follow is to be read as doing so.

§3 — THE GREAT DOORS

3.1 The door scales with the room, not the man

DOCUMENTED. Classical architecture, from which the grand buildings of every later century descend, sizes a doorway as a fraction of the interior it serves, by published rule. Vitruvius, On Architecture IV.6 — the founding text of the tradition — directs that the height from pavement to ceiling be divided into three and a half parts, of which two parts are the height of the doorway: a taller hall requires a taller door under the rule, whatever the height of the men who will walk through it. The treatises that follow him keep the system: the door is dimensioned from the order — from the column height and the façade's proportions — so that the opening reads correctly against the whole. The proportion system, not the population, is what is oversized.

3.2 The door must admit the procession

DOCUMENTED. A cathedral's great door is not, in the first instance, a pedestrian entrance; it is a liturgical instrument, opened on feasts for the procession, and the procession has a physical height of its own. It enters in order: the processional cross carried high on its staff; the candles; the banners of the confraternities on their poles; and on the great feasts the canopy — a cloth of honour carried on four or six poles by bearers, held over the sacrament or the relic as it moves; the bishop in mitre with his crozier borne upright. The opening must clear the procession as carried, several metres of height in motion. The same requirement, in secular form, governs the palace and the town hall: doors sized for ceremony — for a magistrate in state, a guild's banner, a guard of honour. The doors are the height of the rite, not of the race.

3.3 The door must admit the vehicle, the horse, and the load

DOCUMENTED. The great doors of palaces, coaching inns, warehouses, factories, and city gates were working openings. A carriage entrance had to pass a coach with its driver on the box and its horses in harness; a city gate, carts and pack trains; a warehouse door, barrels, bales, and machinery; a stable or mews door, a mounted rider — a man on a horse needs the better part of four metres, in any century, at any human stature. The bronze doors of the Pantheon, among the largest surviving from antiquity at roughly seven and a half metres, served a temple's ritual traffic in a building on the imperial scale throughout; the great bronze doors of baptisteries — Florence's stand over fifteen feet — admitted the crowds of a city's baptismal feasts. None of this sizes a door to a giant. It sizes a door to what had to go through it, which is documented, building by building, in contracts, accounts, and the fabric itself.

3.4 The wicket — the buildings' own testimony

DOCUMENTED — the class's centre. The great doors of Europe very often contain, cut into one of their leaves, a small human-sized door — the wicket — hinged within the great leaf, through which ordinary daily traffic passed while the great leaf stayed shut. The arrangement is documented across cathedrals, churches, castles, and city gates, over centuries. At Durham Cathedral, the medieval north door carries a small wicket cut into its east leaf, known by its own name — “the eye of the needle” — framed in the door's raised moulding, its sill lowered in the 19th and 20th centuries to ease the passage of the ordinary worshippers who used it daily. At Yeocomico Church in Virginia, an enormous battened door of the 17th century — six feet wide and eight feet high — carries its wicket, a smaller door on its own hinges set within the main door, recorded in the building's national heritage documentation as an architecturally famous feature. The type is standard enough to carry its own dictionary definition — a pedestrian door built into a much larger door, the ceremonial door of a cathedral being the definition's own example.

DOCUMENTED — what the fabric says. The great leaf was opened for the procession, the carriage, and the feast. The wicket was opened for people — people of the stature of the people now living, passing one at a time, every day, for centuries. The great leaf is ceremony; the wicket is for people, and it is our size. The same door that is photographed to prove its users were giants carries, cut into itself, the exact measure of its users. The door says so.

3.5 Ceilings and stairs, for completeness

DOCUMENTED. High ceilings in the grand 19th-century interior are documented to their purposes: the proportion system (§3.1); the ventilation of rooms lit by gas and crowded with people, in an age that held foul air to be a carrier of disease and built accordingly; acoustic volume in halls meant for assembly and music; and status — height was the cheapest grandeur a builder could buy, and the era's pattern books sell it openly. Stair risers and treads are likewise codified to the human gait by published rule from the 17th century onward — the rule that twice the riser plus the tread equals a comfortable stride is a formula for human legs, printed in the architectural literature of the period itself. Neither exhibit requires, or survives, a giant occupant.

§4 — THE ELEVATOR

DOCUMENTED — lifts, dated and named. Vertical lifting devices run from the hoists of antiquity — Vitruvius reports a lift built by Archimedes — through the palace machinery of the 17th and 18th centuries. Louis XV's “flying chair” at Versailles, 1743, was a one-person cabin raised by counterweights, built so the king could reach a mistress's rooms unseen. The first screw-drive elevator, built by the inventor Ivan Kulibin and installed in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg in 1793 for Catherine the Great, whose legs no longer managed the stairs, was a platform with a chair, worked by servants, sized to one seated woman. The passenger lifts of the palace age were furniture-sized because their passengers were people; what the industrial age added was not size but safety gear and steam, and with them the freight lift.

DOCUMENTED — a lift's size is set by its load. The large lift car of the old building is overwhelmingly a goods instrument: hotels moved trunks, furniture, coal, and laundry between floors; department stores moved stock; hospitals moved beds — a hospital lift is sized to a bed and its attendants by a century of building regulation; theatres moved scenery; factories moved materials; great houses moved furniture, plate, and fuel. A car that would hold a piano was built to hold a piano. In the old buildings the people's own lift, where one was provided at all, is the small one.

CLAIM — the verdict on the claim-form. The claim that points to the lifts in old and grand buildings and argues from the size of the car to the size of its intended passengers fails at the record: no named building's lift has been produced whose documented purpose was the carriage of oversized persons; the documented purposes are cargo, ceremony, and the carriage of ordinary people, one chair at a time.

§5 — THE REPORTS, AT MEASURE

DOCUMENTED — at first hand. The one great age-of-sail giant report that can be read at first hand is Antonio Pigafetta's account of Magellan's circumnavigation, at Puerto San Julián in 1520. Pigafetta describes the people the fleet met — the Tehuelche, the Aónikenk — in detail that can be checked and largely checks out: the guanaco-skin cloaks, the painted faces, the hide foot-wrappings, the bow and stone points. Of their height he writes the sentence on which two and a half centuries of giant geography rested: the man who came aboard was so tall that the tallest of the Europeans reached only to his waist — an implied stature of the order of ten feet, from a chronicler who carried no measuring rod ashore and measured no one.

DOCUMENTED — the shrinking series. What Pigafetta did not do, later voyages did, and the reports shrink in exact proportion as the instruments improve. Drake's chaplain put the Patagonians at seven and a half feet. Commodore Byron's voyage of 1764–66 came home in rumour at nine feet — and when the voyage's official account was published in 1773, its tallest Patagonian stood six feet six inches, measured. The 19th-century measured series settle the matter: Tehuelche men averaged on the order of six feet — among the tallest peoples ever measured, taller by a head than the southern Europeans of 1520, whose own men stood in the low five-foot range — and entirely human in stature. A tall people, honestly reported as astonishing by short men who did not measure them, then measured by men who did. The giants of Patagonia were finished not by suppression but by arithmetic.

DOCUMENTED — the people's own ending, in one line. The people themselves, the Aónikenk, were largely destroyed in the following century by disease and by the Argentine and Chilean campaigns that cleared the grasslands — a real erasure, of a real people, which this strand's genocide record carries in its proper place.

§6 — THE NEWSPAPER GIANTS

DOCUMENTED — a documented genre. Across the 19th century, American and European newspapers printed giant-skeleton discoveries by the hundred — from burial mounds, mines, wells, and railway cuttings — in a recognisable formula: a skeleton of seven to twelve feet, often with a double row of teeth, examined by no named anatomist, preserved in no collection, and never seen again. The genre is documented as a genre — of the era's journalism, of the mound-builder mythology that preferred a lost race of giants to the Native peoples who had in fact built the mounds, and of a paid-exhibition market that rewarded size.

DOCUMENTED — the Cardiff Giant, entire. In 1869, well-diggers on a farm at Cardiff, New York, uncovered a stone figure ten feet four and a half inches long, exhibited as a petrified giant of the days of Genesis; clergy defended it, crowds paid, and a showman who could not buy it exhibited a copy of it as the real one. The figure was gypsum, quarried in Iowa, carved in Chicago, aged with acid and a needle-studded mallet, and buried a year before its discovery by its maker, the tobacconist George Hull, who had conceived it in an argument with a minister over the literal truth of “there were giants in the earth in those days.” Yale's palaeontologist Othniel C. Marsh pronounced it “a most decided humbug” on its fresh tool-marks and soluble stone — and Hull confessed the whole manufacture to the press on 10 December 1869, proudly, saying he had meant to expose the credulity of the believers. The giant survives in a museum today: as a monument to the market that made it.

DOCUMENTED — the investigated reports dissolve. Where a newspaper giant was followed up by a named investigator, the record shows the formula dissolving: in 1883, a report of a nine-foot skeleton from an Indiana mound was examined by a Dr. M. M. Adams, who determined the man had stood five feet eight inches and pronounced the find a “giant fraud” upon the people. The Smithsonian's own great mound survey — Cyrus Thomas's report of 1894, printed openly — closed the institutional question in the open literature: the mound burials were those of the ancestors of Native peoples, of ordinary stature, the survey printing in full view the exceptional measurements it did find, of the order of seven and a half feet at the extreme.

CLAIM — the modern suppression claim, at its origin. The modern form of the genre adds that the vanished skeletons were taken — that a great institution collected the giant bones and destroyed them to protect the official history. Tested at its evidence, the claim's own history is this: its modern currency dates to December 2014, when a website that describes its own content as satire published an article asserting that a United States Supreme Court ruling had forced the Smithsonian to admit destroying thousands of giant skeletons. The organisation named as plaintiff does not exist; the court case does not exist; no such ruling, admission, or document exists; the institution's spokesman stated the story was untrue, and the wire services' fact-checks record the satire disclaimer the article carried from the start. The article is nonetheless quoted, a decade on, as the suppression's proof.

§7 — THE BONES

DOCUMENTED — real bones, real giants believed, wrong species. The honest middle of the giant record is that giants were genuinely found, genuinely believed, and genuinely exhibited for centuries, and the bones were real. They were the bones of the great extinct beasts, read by an age that had no science of extinction and a canon full of giants.

DOCUMENTED — Dauphiné, 1613: “King Teutobochus.” Workmen in a sandpit near the château de Chaumont uncovered great fossil bones, exhibited across France and Germany as the skeleton of Teutobochus, the Teuton king defeated by Marius — a skeleton of twenty-five feet and more, shown before Louis XIII himself. The anatomist Jean Riolan the Younger insisted, in print, at the time, that the bones were an elephant's; the physician Habicot defended the giant. The bones, and casts of them, survive in Paris, and the re-reading is complete: Blainville in 1835 identified the teeth as a mastodon's; Ginsburg in 1984 narrowed the remains to Deinotherium, one of the great extinct elephant-kind.

DOCUMENTED — Lucerne, 1577: the giant the city adopted. A storm uprooted an oak near the cloister of Reiden and exposed great bones, which the Basel physician Felix Platter examined and pronounced the remains of a giant of nineteen feet, drawing a complete human skeleton at that scale. Lucerne took the giant into its civic arms, where the figure stands as supporter to this day. The anatomist Blumenbach, examining the surviving fragments at the opening of the 19th century, recognised them without difficulty: an elephant's — in the modern reading, a mammoth's.

DOCUMENTED — Claverack, New York, 1705: the antediluvian giant of the new world. A fossil tooth of five pounds and further great bones from the Hudson valley were reported to the Royal Society by Cotton Mather (1712) as the remains of the giants of Genesis, drowned in the Flood — Mather arguing the case in earnest. Others at the time said elephant; a generation later, enslaved Africans in South Carolina, shown a fossil tooth from that region, identified it at once as an elephant's, from knowledge of the living animal. The Claverack tooth was a mastodon's.

DOCUMENTED — St. Louis, 1840: the giant assembled. The showman Albert Koch dug mastodon bones in Missouri and mounted them — with extra vertebrae and ribs from additional individuals, wooden blocks between the vertebrae, tusks set sideways — into a “Missourium,” a leviathan near twice a mastodon's length, which toured America and Europe to paying crowds. Koch sold the mount to the British Museum in 1843, where Richard Owen reassembled the same bones as what they were: a mastodon, at a mastodon's size. The bones stand in London today, at their true measure.

DOCUMENTED — the churches' giants. The same reading filled the churches: the “tooth of St. Christopher” venerated at Valence was a fossil elephant's molar; a saint's arm carried in procession at St. Vincent in 1789 to pray for rain was an elephant's femur; mammoth bones hung in cathedrals as the bones of giants and saints into the age of science. The relics were real bones. The devotion was real. The species was wrong.

DOCUMENTED — the turning of method, not censorship. Cuvier's comparative anatomy at the turn of the 19th century established extinction itself — that the great bones belonged to kinds of animal that no longer live — and gave every museum drawer a test the giant reading could not pass. After it, the giant bones did not vanish. They were relabelled, in public, in the same collections, where they remain — three centuries of men finding real evidence, reading it through the best frame they had, and then, when a better frame was built, re-reading the same bones aloud.

§8 — THE SORT

DOCUMENTED — the kept list, in student form. What from this material's neighbourhood stands in the history, classed as the research file classes it:

Sources

Texts carried as text: Genesis 6 (the Nephilim) · Deuteronomy 3:11 (Og's bedstead of iron, nine cubits by four, at Rabbah) · the Rephaim passages of the historical books · the Book of Enoch in the owner's collection (the Watchers' offspring).

Architectural and building record named in the text: Vitruvius, On Architecture IV.6 (the doorway as two of three and a half parts of the interior height; a lift built by Archimedes) · Durham Cathedral, the medieval north door and its wicket, “the eye of the needle” · Yeocomico Church, Virginia — the 17th-century battened door and its wicket, as recorded in the building's national heritage documentation · the dictionary definition of the wicket — a pedestrian door built into a much larger door · the bronze doors of the Pantheon and of the Florence baptistery · Versailles, 1743 — Louis XV's one-person “flying chair” · the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, 1793 — Ivan Kulibin's screw-drive elevator, a platform with a chair, for Catherine the Great.

Reports and investigations named in the text: Antonio Pigafetta's account of Magellan's circumnavigation — Puerto San Julián, 1520 · Drake's chaplain's account (seven and a half feet) · the published official account of Commodore Byron's voyage, 1773 (six feet six inches, measured) · the 19th-century measured series for Tehuelche men (about six feet) · Dr. M. M. Adams's examination of the 1883 Indiana mound report (nine feet reported; five feet eight inches measured) · Cyrus Thomas's Smithsonian mound survey report, 1894 · Othniel C. Marsh on the Cardiff Giant (“a most decided humbug”) · George Hull's confession to the press, 10 December 1869 · the December 2014 satire-site article at the origin of the modern suppression claim, with the wire services' fact-checks.

Bones and their re-readings named in the text: Jean Riolan the Younger and Habicot on the Dauphiné bones, 1613 · Blainville, 1835 (mastodon) · Ginsburg, 1984 (Deinotherium) · Felix Platter on the Lucerne bones, 1577 · Blumenbach on the Lucerne fragments (elephant) · Cotton Mather's report to the Royal Society on the Claverack tooth, 1712 (a mastodon's) · Albert Koch's “Missourium,” 1840, and Richard Owen's reassembly, 1843 · the “tooth of St. Christopher” at Valence and the processional femur at St. Vincent, 1789 · Cuvier's comparative anatomy and the establishment of extinction.

Read beside this class: Tartary Maps · The Chronology · The Table · Before All Worlds

All Senior History Classes

Record: GIANTS_AND_GREAT_DOORS_THE_RECORD.md (study_materials/world_history), with the cross-addendum in tartaria-the-land-and-the-claim.md — classes carried unchanged.