Giants of the Old World

Across the ancient world, humanity remembered giants. From the earliest civilizations to traditions preserved across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, extraordinary beings appear again and again at the edges of the remembered past. They rule kingdoms, fight wars, raise monuments, possess older knowledge, and inhabit lands before the peoples who later claim them. They stand at the boundary between one age and another. But what, exactly, does this extraordinary record preserve? In Giants of the Old World, Dr. Erik Gray undertakes a sweeping investigation of the surviving evidence, following the record from ancient tradition into historical testimony, extraordinary bodies, burials, and monumental stone. The evidence does not produce one simple answer. What emerges is more compelling. Again and again, humanity remembered the earlier world as different from its own: larger, stronger, older, more dangerous, more knowledgeable, and capable of works that survived long after their makers were forgotten. Giants of the Old World follows that record wherever the evidence leads-through myth and history, bodies and bones, kingdoms and catastrophes, monuments and memory-to ask one of the oldest questions preserved in the human past: Who were the giants?