Collection: Giant Collection

In 2014, the German Archaeological Institute documented a single carved limestone block in the Baalbek quarry measuring 64 by 19.6 by 18 feet and weighing an estimated 1,650 tons. The Institute described it on the record as "the biggest boulder known from antiquity." It was quarried, shaped, and never moved.

This collection runs from the Baalbek megaliths through the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's 1894 Report on the Mound Explorations — Cyrus Thomas's 700-page survey of the eastern earthworks — to the Dead Sea Scroll fragments 4Q203 and 4Q530, where the Book of Giants is preserved in Aramaic. The bones are catalogued. The stones are still there. The reports are at the Internet Archive.

All the artifacts the official record kept and the questions it did not answer. Below.