Whether or not this is a depiction of ancient gods as giants, or just adults and an oddly proportioned child…
You cannot just take everything ever written or depicted literally.
The Sumerian list of their supposed ancient kings goes back nearly a million years. They claim to have kings that reigned for thousands and tens of thousands of years, similar to how many of Adam’s descendants lived hundreds of years.
Like, when you read up on Egyptian beliefs about the dead, do you think that is evidence that Anubis is actually real, or Ra or Osiris or Isis? Do you think that Medusa and the Minotaur are actually real from Greek Mythology, or that even the Roman myth of how Rome was founded is literally true?
Apparently this is how many people do actually think.
King Arthur? Herakles?
Totally Real.
Hamlet? Critias?
100% historically accurate, down to every word.
Even fucking Herodotus, the ‘Father of History’ has been determined to have in many cases just repeated tall tales and exaggerations he heard.
It’s like believing Paul Bunyan was actually real, actually had a big blue ox.
I mean they go thru the effort of putting trees in this, and they look like a palm type. I would guess these people that are the same size as them to be larger then myself, but I dont know the tree they reference so I would have to look into it more. But also it doesent look like a scene where they are 'making' us either so I am not sure this is really talking about that, if anything its like like look we labored together as they could reach the fruits, so we didnt have to climb.
OP, this screenshot is missing additional context to actually say if this is a insane Facebook post or not
At best with the image alone you could say it could be an insane Facebook post due to ambiguity or the post could be describing details from sumerian mythos
Sumerians don’t have a single creation myth. The gods Enki, Enlil and Ninmah are all said to have created mankind in different stories. None of their creation myths involve giants.
I’m not an expert so take anything I say with a grain of salt… Yes, they were gods. They were often called Anunnaki, and Anunnaki are often called giants by conspiracy theorists, ancient alien believers, and christians who equate them to Nephilim, who they believe were giants that actually existed. From what I can tell, the only people who didn’t call the Anunnaki giants were Sumerians
They also don’t have consistent or universal understanding of their myths, they have endless stories that contradict each other and themselves. God’s that fight among humans and bathe in rivers also control fhe heavens and can carry half the planet.
It’s incredibly hard to know what any one image represents, there’s no reason they wouldn’t have drawn gods as bigger versions of people and no reason they wouldn’t have.inclluded children in images so without doing a study of where it was discovered, surrounding artifacts and etc everything is a guess. It could be the punchline to a joke or a reference to an actual short person or all sorts of other forgotten reasons
They’re called people with dwarfism, in this case it looks like proportionate dwarfism. “Little people” is a generally accepted term in the community, but it’s best not to assume with things like that, so just call them a person. It’s actually a very woke carving.
Uh… Sumarian texts talk about giants a few times, and they are depicted often in their glyphs and whatnot.
The Anunnaki are pretty much always depicted as much larger than humans and godlike. Their texts describe them in detail.
It’s literally been translated down all the way to the king James Bible (these ancient texts are the baseline for Abrahamic religions, IE dead sea scrolls):
Genesis 6:1[4]
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.
This is pretty well known that abrahamic religions truly believed giants used to roam the earth. It’s not weird for old glyphs on walls of the very stories of those same religions to depict giants considering their religion talks about em a few times lol.
Literally just Google up on the Anunnaki, there’s lots of info on it.
PS, you way wanna take a second look at that picture, and take note of the fact the giants are being depicted literally as tall as trees are, which were included for scale likely on purpose
Why? Babalonian texts literally talk about giants and describe them this way. It’s not a hot take to say that these people had legends and stories of giants lol.
It’s in their texts. Multiple times. And they literally had a word for then.
I think the problem here is you are arguing giants are in their legends and OP is arguing giants aren’t real. You don’t disagree with each other but are defending your position because we are on the internet and that’s just how it goes
yeah, regardless of the actual intent of ancient Babilonians, thinking that an ancient drawing represents a mythological encounter between giants and humans is definitely a valid idea. it might be incorrect, i don’t know enough about babilonian mythology, but it is not an insane take
Yeah its wild how people think that glyph depictions of legends on a wall (and people looking at that and going “Ah yeah, this is depicting a scene from their legends we have text versions of too”), somehow think we’re arguing giants were real.
To that I just will say that it’s likely “giants” legends were just born through the simple fact way back in the day, people were a lot less homogenous and that people’s height had a lot more variation, due to how secular living was (instead of taking a plane to the other side of the world in a single sitting, you would take multiple days just to go 1 village over)
As a result you had a lot less genetic “sameishness”, so you likely had some areas where people were a lot shorter, and then other areas where people were taller. In particular colder climates had shorter people, and hotter taller.
Due to people’s nomadic natures, it’s pretty likely most legends of both “wee folk” and “giants” were just tall as fuck people from country A meeting up with short as fuck people from country B.
We literally, right now, have humans who you can put em side by side and person A is over twice the height of person B.
So yeah, it’s not hard to imagine if you had a whole family of tall ass people meet up with a family of short ass people, you’ll get through word of mouth (and a bit of story telling), you’ll get legends of “giant” folk.
In particular the folk of europe, especially vikings who travelled quite far and wide, had some pretty fuckin huge populations in terms of height.
And inversely we also had a fair number of fairly short and stout folk from other countries in the middle east.
If one were to meet the other, I mean, it’s not hard to see where the legends would get spun from, lol
I wonder if there are any examples of glyphs that depicted clear, unquestionable children/babies? Like, maybe a picture depicting childbirth, or another clear indicator that the human being depicted is meant to be a child. We could then compare the depiction of these “tiny humans” from this post to those, and see what the artist may have been trying to draw.
I’m not one to blindly believe in something just because their profile says doctor in front of it. For all we know, he is just taking the piss on a funny post. (Not that we’re doing anything more serious, of course.) I just don’t think that we should disregard the idea that these ancient people with known myths about giants may have been drawing a picture of giants just because they could have also been drawing something else.
I don’t doubt the legitimacy of their degree, rather I don’t think that every Facebook post or tweet by every professional should be taken with the upmost seriousness. Like the following sentence from my comment says, sometimes people are just making jokes about something relevant in their field.
The post from the doctor in reference to this post, for example, is written in a joking tone, doesn’t seem to be adamantly declaring a position as fact, isn’t citing any sources or providing relevant info etc. Again, not saying they’re not professional, or that they should have provided sources or anything like that. But it’s a glyph with a tiny person that doesn’t look baby-like next to a tall person the size of a tree, from a society with myths about giants. Without more context it’s hard to say which one is more likely. Someone saying “babies exist” does not provide any more information than we already had, regardless of the education of the person who said it.
Like if I hear a song from a dead artist and say, “I think this song about getting in fights in school is a metaphor for war, they have other songs about war so it’s a possibility”, and a music major tells me “I’d like to remind you once again about the existence of school bullies”, that doesn’t really change my perspective.
Sorry if this sounds stupid or doesn’t make sense lol. I’m bad at putting some of these thoughts to words.
Yeah, for all we know if could be a depiction of a song that was popular in the local area in which one singer talks about how his rival is so damn short that he needs to beg women to pass him dates from the trees.
Anyone saying they know why this is like it is or what it originally meant to people is making a huge leap, unless they have a tablet written by the artist or someone involved then their guess is always going to be a guess and very likely wrong.
Oh, absolutely. It’s directly proportional to their scientific understanding of the origin of mankind, lol. :P
I’m no expert in Babylonian mythology, but if this were in fact a depiction of giants/gods as part of their creation mythos, that makes more sense to me than the OPs insistence that the little one is intended to be a child.
It doesn’t mean that there really were giants any more than the existence of a mythical Zeus means people could once throw lightning bolts for fun.
Just saying that the picture probably isn’t intending the small ones to be children.
Eh, the “child” looks to have much more adult-like proportions to me. The head is to small.
But, as you say, analyzing ancient Sumerian drawings and interpreting them through a modern lense is guesswork at best. Especially since I assume neither of us have the context surrounding this image.
Your gut feeling is that it looks like a mom and child. My gut feeling is that that looks like a small adult. Without further evidence, we’re just in a feelings war.
Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean giants were real in either case. But ancient people pretty holistically believed they did, so seeing them depicted in art wouldn’t be unusual.
No, but I also don’t think their base lines up with something closer to me either. I get that drawing with perspective isn’t something mastered in all cultures for all time, but without that it’s an impossible distinction.
Do you think cultures have only ever done drawings of things in real life and have never depicted anything fictional?
Theu have limited space. The palm trees are just inteded as background. They could have made the people muuch shorter, but that would have made it difficult to give them more details. The workers are the main focus, so they are drawn/chiseled on first and then the palms were added to show an activity and fill in the background.
We’re both just guessing intent though, right? Is there any evidence for either position beyond, “that’s how I feel”?
I’d be happy to change my mind if someone informed on ancient Babylonian art weighed in, but right now we’re both just asserting why we think the picture asserts our interpretation with no basis.
As was said, perspective was not a thing. Also, date palms don’t start tall. And dates are smaller than that. I’m pretty sure those are supposed to be dates.
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