Posted on 02/01/2026 12:18:05 PM PST by MarlonRando
The papyrus describes encounters with the Shosu people, said to stand 'four cubits or five cubits' tall, up to eight feet in height.
Supporters of the theory say the text provides rare non-biblical corroboration of Old Testament accounts of giants, which appear repeatedly beyond the familiar story of David and Goliath.
An Egyptian cubit measured roughly 20 inches, meaning the Shosu would have towered over most people of the era.
The papyrus takes the form of a letter written during a time of war, detailing hostile terrain and military challenges.
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attempts to discredit the Bible
Yes. They got its skeleton. It wasn’t that long ago, though.
The common cubit was about 45 cm, making these 'giants' a bit under 6 feet tall. Even the royal cubit, which was as noted, works out to 82.8346456692 inches, 6' 10", a far cry from Goliath, and perhaps referencing some ancestors of African basketball players, even assuming they were standing around submitting to measurement, and not merely estimated by one of the pygmies in the employ of many of the pharaohs.🤏
https://search.brave.com/search?q=Anastasi+I+papyrus&summary=1
Papyrus Anastasi I is an ancient Egyptian satirical text from the Ramesside Period (circa 1200 BCE), used to train scribes during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. Officially designated British Museum papyrus 10247, it was purchased from merchant Giovanni Anastasi in 1839 and has been housed in the British Museum since then.
The papyrus contains a letter from an army scribe named Hori to his fellow scribe Amenemope, written in a highly satirical tone to mock Amenemope’s incompetence and lack of practical knowledge. Hori ridicules Amenemope for being unskilled in administrative and military tasks, such as calculating rations for soldiers, estimating bricks for ramps, or organizing army supplies.
A significant portion of the text includes a vivid, fictionalized account of Amenemope’s disastrous journey through mountainous terrain in Canaan and Syria, describing dangers like ambushes by the Shosu people, who are described as “four cubits or five cubits” tall—equivalent to approximately 6 to 8 feet—fueling modern debate about possible references to giants in ancient texts.
The document is also a crucial historical source for geography and place names in the Levant during the New Kingdom, listing numerous towns along the Jordan River watershed, the Litani River, and the Orontes River, including Kadesh, Joppa (Jaffa), Megiddo, Beth-sha-el, and Rehob, offering valuable insight for biblical archaeology.
The papyrus is written in hieratic script on a 8.11-meter-long roll, with 28 pages of 8–9 lines each, and is considered one of the finest examples of Ramesside literary papyri.
AI-generated answer. Please verify critical facts
https://dbpedia.org/page/Papyrus_Anastasi_I
https://cojs.org/papyrus_anastasi_i-_c-_1200_bce/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Anastasi_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shasu
My thought exactly, where are the bones of these giants?
Ancient weights and measures. You gotta love them. Absolutely freaking worthless. A cubit is anywhere from 45 cm to eleventy gabillion hectares, give or take a few horsepower. I don’t even know why they bothered to write them down. Here’s another good one—- the “bath”
Giants!
They could have rolled out a blank scroll and traced the outline of one of the '4 to 5 cubit' tall individuals.
Sounds like a tall tale.
She blinded me with Giants!
What’s a cubit? (Bill Cosby)
None. Never have been any found, despite claims. Fossils of extinct animals have been misinterpreted as giants or other critters. The Cyclops myth arose due to mammoth remains and lack of experience with living relatives such as elephants.
https://freerepublic.com/tag/adriennemayor/index
methinks they got the conversion a bit wrong.
There’s varying opinions among scholars.
the giants described in the bible date from and look very much like the people of the steppe herders in what is modern day ukraine called the yamnaya people. They were the first to tame the horse. They invented the chariott and they mined copper in the early bronze age. They were also head and shoulders bigger than everyone else. They took over europe and india, turkey and persia. they pushed into syria but were only sporadic in Israel. Their dna footprint is slight but that looks like about how they’re described in the bible: big powerful but few in number. Oh and here is the kicker. They expanded out from the Ukraine by killing all the men in the villages they encountered and taking the females as wives. That’s what the bible describes.
but the bible is so explicit about there being big men like goliath or Og or Anak they they must have existed. Its unlikely that they were mythical. I did some research on this. My guess is that they are the steppe herders from today’s ukraine called the yamnaya people. They pushed as far south as Israel/Jordan/Syria but their numbers were few. (They did not push into Egypt or Saudi Arabia) People in that region do have some yamnaya markers but those markers are few—but that corresponds to the bible recounting of them as being few. The records of them showed that they were head and shoulders bigger than everyone else in the way westerners are usually head and shoulders bigger than vietnamese. They first tamed the horse and invented the chariot. They first mastered copper. They expanded not by horsemen in the thousands thundering across eurasia. But only in small groups of men who would enter a village, kill all the men and then take the women as wives. This was a slow process that took 1000 years to complete. But it dates to the same timeline as the time line in the bible for the encounters with these people.
perplexity.ai says:
Yes—those guys are great counter‑examples to any claim that extreme height is automatically non‑functional.
Gheorghe Mureșan reached 7′7″ because of a pituitary disorder (gigantism/acromegaly), yet still played several seasons in the NBA and needed tumor treatment primarily for long‑term health risk, not because walking was impossible.scholar.lib.vt+2
Sun Mingming at 7′9″ likewise had acromegaly from a pituitary tumor, but after surgeries he was able to train for hours per day and play professional basketball, even if his size imposed extra strain and medical issues.latimes+2
Olivier Rioux, currently listed around 7′9″ and ~305 lb, was tall from early childhood and is playing high‑level organized basketball as a redshirted college center, which suggests at least some tall individuals can be highly active without obvious crippling disability.wikipedia+1
So: human biology clearly allows rare, functioning individuals close to 8 feet tall. That supports your main point: the fact that something is statistically extreme does not mean it is biologically impossible or necessarily non‑functional, and it leaves the door open—at least in principle—for a rare, very tall warrior or champion figure in antiquity.
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