Many of you out there who believe in giants point to artwork from the past in support of the idea that gigantic humans and normal-size humans used to co-exist. People that appear gigantic must have really been gigantic, right? Here is one website claiming that artwork supports the notion of giant ancient Egyptians. Here is another. Here is one about Sumer. Here is another Sumer one. I wrote here about how Ramses II was depicted as very large in comparison to other humans. Unfortunately for giant enthusiasts, Rameses II's mummy demonstrates that he was about 5'7". My solution to the contradiction presented by a normal-sized Rameses was that all those around him were actually very, very small.
But let's put aside the inconvenient facts for a moment and enjoy this depiction of giant Frenchmen building a fort in the mid-1500's:
But let's put aside the inconvenient facts for a moment and enjoy this depiction of giant Frenchmen building a fort in the mid-1500's:
The image is a colorized version of one of the engravings of Jacques Le Moyne, who accompanied Jean Ribaut's expedition to the New World. The Ribaut expedition established a settlement (Charlesfort) on Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1562. (The illustration above is typically described as showing Fort Caroline, another Ribaut expedition fort that would have been located to the south on the Georgia or Florida coast. For reasons I won't go into here, there is good reason to think the illustration above depicts the construction of Charlesfort rather than Fort Caroline. You can read about the controversy over the location of Fort Caroline, which has never been found, here.)
Giant enthusiasts will immediately note the size of the men constructing the fort in Le Moyne's illustration. The fourteen men (who apparently arrived on the island in the two open canoes) are as tall as the trees and tower over the walls of the fort they are building. They're so big, in fact, that it's unclear to me why they would even need a fort to protect themselves. What are they afraid of? The walls and moat are clearly not built to keep out other giants, as it's pretty obvious that our French giants could just hop right over them. The best I can come up is that these French giants must have been building this fort to protect themselves from the normal-size native population. One problem with this idea, however, is that Spanish accounts from this same region describe the indigenous peoples themselves as being "giants." So the giant French were trying to protect themselves from the less-giant-but-still-giant Native Americans. Or the Native Americans were normal-sized and the Spaniards were super small.
Or maybe not everything in these depictions is accurately scaled and represented.
Giant enthusiasts will immediately note the size of the men constructing the fort in Le Moyne's illustration. The fourteen men (who apparently arrived on the island in the two open canoes) are as tall as the trees and tower over the walls of the fort they are building. They're so big, in fact, that it's unclear to me why they would even need a fort to protect themselves. What are they afraid of? The walls and moat are clearly not built to keep out other giants, as it's pretty obvious that our French giants could just hop right over them. The best I can come up is that these French giants must have been building this fort to protect themselves from the normal-size native population. One problem with this idea, however, is that Spanish accounts from this same region describe the indigenous peoples themselves as being "giants." So the giant French were trying to protect themselves from the less-giant-but-still-giant Native Americans. Or the Native Americans were normal-sized and the Spaniards were super small.
Or maybe not everything in these depictions is accurately scaled and represented.
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