And when some old scribe tells his tale of foes by cubit, and the figures would not remain in the world of abstraction? The British Museum contains Papyrus Anastasi I, a training text of the New Kingdom world of Egypt, which reads in some passages as though it were the examination of professional ability: know the roads, know the provisions, know how to tell what was seen. In a graphic episode, the author cautions about a mountain pass where one must navigate a very thin trail since there is danger in the bush. The part which still draws the attention of modern times is that which gives the danger a measure: Of four cubits, or five cubits, head and foot, fierce of countenance, their heart is not soft, Nor they do hearken to flattering.
That one sentence alone has turned into a pivot point between disciplines that do not necessarily have a common vocabulary. Biblical readers see a reflection in Numbers 13:33 “we were in our own sight as grasshoppers” in a greater tradition of exaggerated adversaries. Another thing can be identified by engineers, anthropologists, and historians: an attempt to quantify something old-world. Papyrus Anastasi I The measurement is no decoration; it belongs to the distinction between a trained and an unreliable scribe.
The important unit, as usual with ancient units, is the cubit. Reading the passage in the Royal Egyptian cubit, the given range would be about 6 ft 8 in to 8 ft 6 in, or tall enough to be memorable in a landscape where the vast majority of men were much shorter than that, but not so tall that a completely new species was necessary. Another practical field description, but not heroic poetry, is also signaled by the telling phrase in the papyrus, “from nose to foot”
Egyptian documents frequently refer to collections at the periphery as broad-groupings, and “Shasu” may be used as a generic term to describe those people that happen to be on the road to conflict. It is not valuable in that it demonstrates a biblical moment, but rather the continuation of a technical habit: the transformation of fear into an approximation. It also reveals why the document attracts repetitive attention, because it exists at the border between narrative and the history-keeping, in which the ancient world occasionally becomes readable on its own terms.
Simultaneously, the contemporary discussion of the “giant” is inundated with the statements claiming that it fails to stand a basic test. In an urban legend on the internet, American institutions are alleged to have concealed or erased the records of the presence of enormous skeletons; the more factually documented record of the legend is that the “Smithsonian destroyed thousands of giant skeletons” story has a provenance of its own fiction. In their analysis of the alleged court ruling, Snopes embodies the way in which falsified images and fabricated institutions can become folklore.
Papyrus Anastasi I is of another type of material: it is a tangible object in an established collection, a genre in which competence is valued, and tied to an educational goal. Non fictis is that its “four or five cubits” is a census. It renders it a piece of data- one that can be compared with what is known about ancient measuring and scribing and the ways in which societies refer to threatening strangers.
Ultimately, the papyrus fails to answer the question of giants, but rather explains why the question remains. where bodies perish, a measured description remains unperished, a few of the cubits carefully counted, not a bad sort of thing to be found in any age, and each subsequent reader of the work is invited to enquire whether the line was a glance, or an exaggeration, or something intermediate.
