Adam's Sixty Cubits — A Sahih Hadith and Its Questions

A Man as Tall as a Ten-Storey Building

There is a hadith in the two most trusted collections of Sunni Islam — Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — that describes the first human being, Adam, as sixty cubits tall. Sixty cubits. If you take the cubit at its common value of roughly forty-five to fifty centimetres, that is a man standing between twenty-seven and thirty metres — as tall as a ten-storey building.

The report does not stop there. It says that everyone who enters Paradise will take the form of Adam, and that human beings have been shrinking, generation after generation, from Adam's day until now.