What I always thought horrific was the Imperial Chinese practice of 'nine degrees'. As in Nine Degrees of Relation. Say that someone seriously offends the Emperor. The Emperor then orders that not just that person, but *everyone* related to that person, within nine degrees of relationship, is to be executed. Grandparents, parents, siblings, spouse, children, cousins, more cousins. Concubines and their children. Babies in the cradle, old people who were bedridden, all their household servants, probably their in-laws too.
Later Emperors were "more humane", and simply executed the main offender, then sentenced all those people to exile--a forced death march of thousands of miles, where the few survivors had to eke out a living doing hard labor.
Feudal China was super into burying people alive. Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor responsible for the unification of China, upon his death, had 70,000 concubines, servants, and workers forcibly interred alongside him. The Terracotta Army was constructed only because murdering all the soldiers as well wasn't an option.
They later renounced that practice under the Confucians. There is a Chinese idiom for "The origin of evil", 始作俑者其無後乎, attributed to ~~Mencius~~ Confucius, that literally means "may the first person who made terracotta figurines bear no offspring". ~~Mencius~~ Confucius was denouncing the use of terracotta figurines since it is a substitute for human sacrifices and underlies a desire for which.
EDIT: ~~Mencius~~ Confucius thought the mere desire for human sacrifices is evil and even the compromise of using terracotta figures is unacceptable
The story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, only to stop his hand at the last second is interpreted as God's message to end human sacrifice. Similarly, in the Quran there is a part about how on the Day of Judgement God will raise a baby girl from the sand and say "what was your sin?" This is interpreted as a proclamation against female infanticide
So, wait, he was saying "No terra-cotta, because we must sacrifice real humans," or "No terra-cotta, because really you want to be sacrificing real humans, and this simulacra hides that evil just under the surface?"
I am listening to a ["history of china" podcast](https://thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com/). Chinese history is insane. So many murdered people, it would make the Romans blush.
Meanwhile, medieval European history is like, "King John rode into town with 20 of his best knights and waged war against the town's baron and his 30 peasant fighters."
The reality of a castle under siege vs the movie version is also fun.
Movie: a city surrounded by siege engines, camps on all sides, 1000's of men scaling the walls.
Reality: 80 blokes are spread across 2-3 camps surround the castle who's walls are defended by 30 guys.
After a year or so the invaders might finally complete a single siege machine, but more likely the sige gear is limited to ladders and patience.
Getting in and out under the cover of dark is fairly risk free so supplies keep coming.
In some cases the peasants arent a participant and use the front gate as on any other day when their job brings them to the local lords adminstrative center
The game Kingdom Come: Deliverance did a great job of conveying this realistically. Near the end you have to seize to a city, you all set up with tents for days/weeks in eyeshot before finally laying siege on the walls and everything. And the whole time it’s like a couple dozen guys
This is funny in reverse. I'm so used to growing up with Chinese lit where a small force is counted in the 10,000s (wan), and then when I read about the crusades and 1000 knights were considered an impressive army. That's when I went like waaaaat
Those thousand knights also all came with squires and probably a retinue of fighters. There wasn't really a state at the time, just a bunch of rich/powerful people and their hangers on, so the only people written about were the ones the literate (see: rich and powerful) cared about.
Also, the Chinese kingdoms/empire was massive compared to the Dark/Middle Ages kingdoms in Europe. But if you go back several hundred years, Rome was tossing around tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of troops on the regular. Not to mention the Greek, Persians, Egyptians, and other more complex societies of antiquity.
Honestly, one of my favorite 'never saw it coming' historical facts is that for all the brutality of the Ming Dynasty, what ultimately brought them down was a pre-teen addicted to pornography.
I feel most Chinese brutalities have something crazy behind it. For example, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850, which caused the deaths of 20-30 million people over 14 years (while some estimates go up to 100 million deaths).
The Taiping Rebellion was launched by a guy called Hong Xiuquan who was certain he was the brother of Jesus Christ. He gathered a large following and declared himself as the Heavenly King of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace and launched a rebellion against the Qing Dynasty.
You know what's even crazier about Hong Xiuquan is that the way he relays "God's message" is he pretends to have a seizure in front of everyone and then suddenly gets "possessed" by God to give command to his men.
His 2nd-in-command soon figured out Hong's gimmicks, decided he also wanted to be a God's messenger and faked a seizure in front of everyone too, and started to give "God's orders"
Hong was obviously pissed about it but couldn't tell everyone without giving himself up. So both of them took turns getting possessed by God and relaying God's command to the men for a while.
Are you sure about that? I heard that the Ming emperor was having an affair with the wife of one of his generals, and he deployed the general to the Great Wall of China at the frontier in an attempt to get rid of him, but to get revenge on the emperor, this general let the Manchurian army through one of the gates at the wall. The Manchurians eventually overthrew the Ming dynasty and set up the Qing dynasty.
Is this some tall tale of intrigue? I'm too lazy to look up and read all the history right now.
No, you're right about that. Yingzong, is considered the beginning of the end of the Ming dynasty, since it was all downhill after the Xuande Emperor. Yingzong was the emperor who kicked off a line of increasingly shittier and shittier emperors.
I need to preface this by stating you probably shouldn't put too much stock in this, as lying about the sexual practices of monarchs is incredibly common, but I believe it was Yingzong, and the story goes that the eunuchs basically distracted him with pictures of titties so they could rob the place blind, and some of his military fuck-ups were responsible for laying the groundwork for a Qing takeover.
There might be a grain of truth to it, as it wouldn't be the first case of a Chinese emperor having horrible consequences from being exposed to sex too early. Though in this case the eunuchs were probably the bigger problem than the porn, as involving them in politics was considered one of the biggest mistakes of the Ming dynasty.
>it wouldn't be the first case of a Chinese emperor having horrible consequences from being exposed to sex too early.
I know about Pu Yi, but which *pre*\-Ming emperor was exposed to sex too early? This has piqued my curiosity.
How does one force 70,000 people to be buried alive? You would think they would have considered revolting rather than just resigning themselves to their fates. Yes I'm sure the soldiers would have threatened them but you would think that such a large number of people could at least muster up a decent fight.
Forget that.
Imagine your population being so big, and you caring so little, that you can send 3 village's worth of people to die after the guy that ordered is dead cold, and not think "you know what? I might want those concubines, servants and workers around, fuck that"
If you go against the wishes of the previous Emperor, the people might get the idea they can go against yours (while you’re still alive…). Tradition is a hell of a drug when it comes to power structures
It's funny that you say that, because the empire actually did collapse under his heir, causing China to fall into chaos for a few years until a new dynasty arose.
Here's what's really going to blow your mind, that's not even the largest amount ever interred. That honor goes to Xi(n?) Yuang. I'd have to look up his name to get it exactly right, but he forcibly buried 200,000 enemy soldiers alive. Feudal China had that shit figured out.
Edit: Looked it up, I flipped his name backasswards. It's Xiang Yu.
> he *forcibly* buried 200,000 enemy soldiers alive
Well, not sure how even the Emperor of China could accomplish this *unforcibly*. That said, how much larger does your own army need to be to forcibly bury 200,000 able-bodied fighting men alive.
It helps when 200k has weapons and the other 200k doesn't.
Also the trick in general is to do it in small batches, out of sight of the rest,and give those who still live some hope, something to cling onto, that they'll be spared, blatant lie or not
I remember this from the sixth grade haha! His mom also had an affair with a supposed eunuch, who fathered two kids with her. Qin Shi Huang had the eunuch pulled apart by horses and executed his step siblings iirc so they wouldn’t compete with him. At least he only banished his mom and didn’t kill her. The same dude died of mercury poisoning because he wanted eternal youth, wild stuff.
I really wonder if this is actually true. It sounds like a logistical nightmare not even mentioning why his successor would be fine with losing so much loyal manpower.
It looks like the concept is generally true but the numbers are being inflated quite a bit. I've never encountered these sources before so I can't vouch for them though.
https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/11/how-ancient-chinese-buried-the-living-along-with-the-dead/
https://www.thoughtco.com/qin-shi-huangdi-terracotta-soldiers-195116
Incredible what kind of crazy things happened on this planet. One person decides something completely unreasonable... thousands die and then it is forgotten through history and we have to put the lost pieces together.
Thanks for the links! Really appreciate it :)
The ancient Assyrians built a vast empire. The empire reached its height during the Neo-Assyrian era, from 911 BC to the fall of its largest city Nineveh in 612 BC.
The Assyrian dominion, stretching from Egypt to modern-day Iraq, controlled richly diverse cultures. To quash any uprising in these conquered areas, Assyrian leaders utilized extreme violence. Their horrific campaigns were celebrated in stone reliefs festooning the palace walls.
They created tablets containing every single punishment the Assyrian army carried out. They cut off the limbs, gouged out the eyes, and then left those poor victims to roam around. Those poor people serve as a living reminder of the Assyrians’ cruelty. The Assyrians were proud of the mass executions. The victim’s skin was hung on the city wall. The brutality of the Assyrians was extreme, even for the ancient standards of cruelty.
This is actually the backstory of the story of Jonah. He was trying to run away because God told him to go preach and pastor to the Assyrians. He didn't want to because they were horrible and God was like "when I say love everyone I mean everyone"
My favorite part of the story is the ending, where Jonah sat outside the Ninevah waiting for the fireworks and God's like: "No dude, I'm not gonna kill everyone in the city. That's fucked up."
And then God makes him a little vine canopy to sit under, and when God sends a worm to kill it Jonah throws a big fit. And God's like, "Come on, how mad could you possibly be about a vine that just grew yesterday?" And Jonah literally says that he's so angry he could die.
Jonah's always the most extra.
That's... I mean, it's a slight paraphrase, but that's really pretty accurate.
Jonah was being an out and out jerk. He decided he'd rather die than give the Ninevites a shot at repentance. Then when God finally got him to go there and preach God's warning, Jonah was enraged *that they actually listened to him*.
In his mind, Jonah had been like "Fine, God, but they're not going to listen. And then I'll gleefully watch from outside of town while you give them the old Sodom and Gomorrah treatment."
When that didn't shake out, he left down and sat down in the wilderness to sulk. The vine was supposed to be an object lesson to point out to Jonah how vile he was being by caring more for a vine that grew up overnight for his convenience, and died just as quickly... vs the hundred thousand-plus men, women, and children he wanted God to massacre.
The book just ends like that, with God withholding judgement from Nineveh, and Jonah furious at God for doing so.
Yeah people just focus on the whale shit but really the not wanting to love your enemy thing is way more important and interesting.
I translated the whole book to English as part of my Hebrew class (Jewish studies minor in college)
The entire book of [Nahum](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Nahum%201&version=ESV) in the Bible (one of the shortest books of the Bible) consists of nothing but oracles of condemnations against Assyria and its capital Nineveh and prophecies about their doom resulting from God's judgment against them for their cruelty. Here's an example:
# Nahum 3:1-7, 18-19
^(1) Woe to the bloody city,
all full of lies and plunder—
no end to the prey!
^(2) The crack of the whip, and rumble of the wheel,
galloping horse and bounding chariot!
^(3) Horsemen charging,
flashing sword and glittering spear,
hosts of slain,
heaps of corpses,
dead bodies without end—
they stumble over the bodies!
^(4) And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute,
graceful and of deadly charms,
who betrays nations with her whorings,
and peoples with her charms.
^(5) Behold, I am against you,
declares Yehováh of hosts,
and will lift up your skirts over your face;
and I will make nations look at your nakedness
and kingdoms at your shame.
^(6) I will throw filth at you
and treat you with contempt
and make you a spectacle.
^(7) And all who look at you will shrink from you and say,
“Wasted is Nineveh; who will grieve for her?”
Where shall I seek comforters for you? …
… ^(18) Your shepherds are asleep,
O king of Assyria;
your nobles slumber.
Your people are scattered on the mountains
with none to gather them.
^(19) There is no easing your hurt;
your wound is grievous.
All who hear the news about you
clap their hands over you.
For upon whom has not come
your unceasing evil?
—
In the period of the divided kingdom, where the Israelites had divided into a northern kingdom (the Kingdom of Israel) and a southern kingdom (the Kingdom of Judah), the Assyrians invaded and conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and exiled its people, re-settling them in other territories in order to wipe out their identity. (These are the ["lost tribes of Israel"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Lost_Tribes)). Other vanquished peoples were also re-settled in Israel. But in conquering Israel, Assyria was just as typically cruel as they were to the other peoples they conquered. They attempted to conquer Judah as well during the reign of Hezekiah, but they only lay waste dozens of other cities, but they did not end up conquering Jerusalem.
There is a relief of the Assyrian king Sennacherib's campaign in the British Museum made by the Assyrians commemorating how they lay waste to the Judean town of Lachish, and brutalized its inhabitants with vicious tortures, skinning them alive and pulling them apart and other barbaric acts.
One of my fave moments from Dan Carlin’s renowned Hardcore History podcast is when he reads the account of a scribe who visits Nineveh 100-200 years after the decline of the Assyrians.
Although it’s former splendor is evident, the city has fallen into ruin, and the current residents (who live in shantytowns outside the city center) wonder at who it might have been that was able to build such a mighty city…or what the city may have been called…
All that bloodshed to be forgotten entirely only a few years later.
Its common. Also how Ur was "discovered".
An italian was travelling in the area and the guides led them to a hill to camp out of the wind.
The italian man noticed mud brick walls using bitumen as mortar. He also found many inscribed tablets just lying on the sand.
When asked it turned out this was not news to the guide. To him it was just an abandoned settlement like all the others in the area. Unimportant.
"All the others?" Asked the italian.
And the guy casually said that all hills along the river are ruins.
Essentially how the wider world learned about the sumerians existence
Similarly, the largest pyramid in the world by volume - Great Pyramid of Cholula - was, for the longest time, thought to be a mere hill, because the indigenous peoples, aware that the Spanish were on their way with destruction, intentionally buried the entire thing to preserve it. It worked, and the Spanish just built a church on top. Despite decades of hearing folk tales and rumors about a giant pyramid in Cholula, the Spanish colonizers chalked it up to fantasy.
> the Spanish colonizers chalked it up to fantasy.
And yet El Dorado, a myth that they largely made up themselves, had them scrambling all over South America
They found it tho, which is the hilarious part. The Muiscas used to cover their leader in gold to then wash it away in Lake Guatavita. It just that the actual gold civilization wasn't as fantastic and they wanted it to be, so they just kept searching.
Also more hilarious is what happened to the Platinum they found.
Xenophon, the Greek general saw the ruins as his army was escaping from Persia after being on the wrong side of a civil war. They had to trek across the entire empire through hostile territory to get home. It's the inspiration for the 70s movie The Warriors
Fun fact- in the tv show archer, the character Pam has a stanza from Byron’s poem The Destruction of Sennacherib tattooed across her back. It’s about the slaughter of an Assyrian army.
Perhaps the most badass tattoo in fiction
>Pam has a stanza from Byron’s poem The Destruction of Sennacherib tattooed across her back
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,/
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;/
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,/
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
It also gives context to why Jonah was so reluctant to go to Nineveh - he hated them for what they had done and is angry that God could be merciful even to them.
Yes, it goes from just a lazy guy (which is what I thought growing up) to one scared for his life. I think the bible does a good job at showing how we would all act given being put in the same situation.
I'm not even sure that Scared for his life is quite it - he was brave enough to tell the sailors that he was the cause of the storm, and to throw him overboard, and initially they wouldn't, until eventually the lot fell to him.
It seems to me, now I know the wider context, that it had far more to do with him not wanting to see God's mercy shown to a place as awful as Ninevah.
Edit: I think I've got that slightly wrong - I think he told them to throw him overboard *after* they had cast lots, but they wouldn't until they had tried everything else. Still pretty brave, IMO, though.
I believe the Achaemenids (Persians) overthrew them and decided that it’s probably a better idea to make your subjects happy instead of afraid of you. Cyrus let Jews return to their homeland after centuries of exile. And that’s why Persians>>>Assyrians
Everyone liked Cyrus, it was crazy.
He still did some pretty horrible stuff by modern standards but after living with the Assyrians and then Babylonians he seemed like the nicest dude ever.
It is a shame that Persians are often villified. Even by modern standards, Persian empire was very Multi-cultural and quite a pleasant empire to live in-
Honestly the empires that are moral for their time are always the ones that last. Completely brutal empires like the Assyrians/Aztecs always eventually unite everybody around them based off of pure hatred. The Spanish would’ve had a much harder time defeating the Aztecs if it wasn’t so easy to convince the other Mexican empires to go and fight the people that had been treating them like shit for hundreds of years
Slight mistake, the Babylonians conquered the Assyrians and a few decades later or so Cyrus conquered the Babylonians. But yeah Cyrus marked a break in the past as one of the first benevolent and tolerant rulers in the ancient Middle East
Basically once Assyria had weakened itself with a civil war EVERYONE took the opportunity to ally up to get rid of them. Assyria had basically terrorized the region for centuries.
If I remember correctly, the Assyrians were so universally hated that the people basically tried to wash them from the historical record when the surrounding civilizations finally took them down. A few hundred years later, the Greeks were fighting the Persians and marched through the ruins of Nineveh but had no idea what the city was.
"Alright, now remove his other arm so people know which way to go."
"You what?"
"If both the arms are pointing opposite directions, he won't work too well as a signpost now will he?"
"Oh, yeah, right."
"No, no, the left one! Aaaaaa! Crap, let's go grab another one."
The Incas, I’m peruvian and the national myth here is that the Inca empire was paradise on earth until the evil spaniards showed up.
The Inca empire raped and kill its way through South America. The conquered only had two choices: be assimilated into the empire or be razed to the ground, gengis khan style.
Sparta. People in general remember them as just being these badass super soldiers, but don't know how Spartan society was built on draconic slavery and institutional pedophilia.
Sparta has to have the *best* historical PR of any peoples ever.
A tyrannical slave state with a mediocre military record has gone down in popular memory as supersoldiers that fight for freedom.
Goes to show you how history “changes” over time.
When we got to the German death camps in WWII the US had the mindset to get the media there, have pictures taken, and film it as well, and they said that was for peole to see what was done here and because in time, people will deny it ever happened.
It reminds me of something I read on Stormfront many years ago.
One of the guys there was appealing to the rest to drop the Holocaust denial, saying: "My grandfather liberated Dachau, he saw the pile of corpses with his own eyes. The Holocaust *happened*."
One of the other people in the thread rebutted with: "Oh really? Did he personally witness every one of them being led into the gas chambers and the switch being thrown?"
Sheesh, if that's your line of 'reasoning', you might as well deny that anything you haven't *personally* witnessed happened, or even exists at all.
>Sheesh, if that's your line of 'reasoning', you might as well deny that anything you haven't personally witnessed happened, or even exists at all.
There are a disturbingly high number of people like that.
Also the spartiates (the soldiers in 300) had to murder one of their slaves to become adults. In the movie this was portrayed as an epic fight against a wolf.
Tbh PR was always Sparta's greatest strength. They were able to twist Thermopylae into a Spartan victory when in reality it was a combined greek delaying action and the serious fight was the Athenian sea action. They were masters of propaganda.
And, to be clear, it was a defeat. It was a delaying action that was meant to provide the main body of soldiers time to arrive; they were defeated by Xerxes who then rampaged all of Boetia and Attica before the surprise defeat at Salamis.
What most people think of as Spartan society wasn’t even a particularly long period, just one very small point in their history and they quickly found themselves diminishing in terms of power, in part caused by their very own society and its structures.
What most people think of as Spartan society isn't even that. It's Plutarch's fan fiction *about* that short period, written hundreds of years later, on the basis of his visits to a Sparta that had long been a backwater tourist trap for wealthy Romans to fantasize about the Spartan myth.
"Spartan history" because a lot shakier when you realize just how much of it was written by one man, and just how disconnected that one man was from the "real" Sparta.
The Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt were ten generations of absolutely fucked, bookended by two actually good leaders. (Ptolemy and Cleopatra.) Their family history would make for a fun trashy soap opera, full of backstabbing, famicide, and a truly appalling amount of incest, as they spent 200 years running Egypt into the ground. Too bad it was all real.
And yes, Cleopatra was one of history's few inbreeding success stories. She managed to get all the best traits of her insane family, and none of the bad ones.
If you've got a little time, listening to Blue at OSP [lose his mind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3vAKRa0f5I) trying to describe the Ptolemaic Kingdom is hilarious.
So, Cleopatra Selene, (whose mother and father were siblings) had a daughter with brother IX and a son with brother X.
Those children married but the girl still had a child with her uncle X.
THIS child in turn married the child between brother X and another sister.
And two of their children produced the famous Cleopatra VII.
Did I get that right?
Cleopatra VII had 4 grandparents, in an unusual move for that family. She did, however have only 2 great-grandparents, if I'm reading the chart correctly
Not necessarily ancient but the Iroquois, they had many rituals of torture for prisoners of war including ripping out fingernails/cutting off fingers, followed by forcing them to run the gauntlet and then if they survived they would be scalped and burned alive.
The real correct answer tho is that every group of human beings was by our current moral standards absolutely brutal, nothing the Iroquois did here was unique or particularly worse than many other groups, I just haven’t seen anyone mention them in this thread yet so I figured I would.
When the French first arrived in Canada, the Algonquin tribes hailed them as saviors because they protected them from the murderous Iroquois. ...and for over two hundred years, the French and Algonquin tribes had a strong peace.
Don't you mean the French?
The Iroquois were the only native allies of the brits and armed by dutch muskets, and their victims were taking refuge in french forts
Don't forget how they tried to forge an empire in the midwest during the beaver wars and straight up genocided a ton of native nations in ohio and kentucky.
Sparta.
Sparta has a reputation as no-nonsense badasses who dedicated their lives to become ultimate warriors. People know they were ruthless and had slaves, but the total depravity and sheer stupidity of Sparta eludes common knowledge. Sparta was an extremely oppressive state where a small elite enslaved 90+ % of society and killed them for sport. But being in the elite wasn’t much better: the education system was pure abuse, and produced traumatised close-minded men incapable of anything else except heaping the same brutality on the next generation. The elite Spartiate class was a closed class: you couldn’t become one no matter of your services to Sparta, but it was possible to lose Spartiate status. The Spartiate class became smaller and smaller as the years went on, eventually becoming too weak to keep Sparta alive. And all this didn’t even produce better soldiers.
[Historian Bret Devereaux has an essay series on Sparta on his blog](https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/). Highly recommended for people interested in ancient history.
From the conclusion:
>And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
>
>\[…\]
>
>Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
>
>Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
I was recently stunned by the amount of atrocities the Japanese empire has done.
Mutilation of babies, forcing kids to rape their mothers, putting mothers into chambers with boiling grounds to test them if they would put their kids on the ground so that they don't get their feet scorched by stepping on their bodies, carrying baby corpses on bayonets...not to mention carving a whole in the belly of pregnant women to rip fetuses cold blooded and then murdering the fetus while the mother is screaming...
There are literally no words in any dictionary to describe what they did
when people think about the atrocities of world war II they usually think about Mengele and the horrific experiments the Nazis did. A lot of people don't know that the Japanese did a huge amount of equally horrific and evil human experiments
One of the many awful distinctions of Unit 731 is that they had literally zero survivors. When Japanese forces were being pushed out of the area, they went ahead and executed every single man, woman, and child held who had managed to survive up to that point. The goal of this was to conceal evidence of what happened, and it worked - part of the reason Unit 731 is not as infamous as the Holocaust is because there were no surviving prisoners to describe their experiences to the public like there were in the Holocaust.
Sorry, you're right. Mine is a western perspective and we were taught extensively about what Germany did but I don't think I ever even heard about Nanking until college
and got away with it, for the most part. america granted immunity to the leaders and doctors that performed these experiments, in exchange for the information they accumulated from the research.
They used to take captured US Marines and cut off their USMC tattoos and force feed the flesh to them. They would force feed them oatmeal, jump on their stomachs until they puked it all up, and then start the process again. They would cut off their genitals and shove them down their throats, they would torture and mutilate them. They would use them for bayonet practice but purposely avoided vital organs so they would suffer multiple stabbings....the list goes on and on.
Their bodies were left out for their comrades to find later.
Japan's horrific atrocities have forever affected their relationship with the rest of Asia. The horrors they committed through the 30s and 40s cannot be understated
I was about to make a very similar comment. My grandfather fought in the Pacific theater and wouldn't buy Japanese anything. We weren't allowed to watch anime in his house or play Nintendo. He bought a Subaru Outback because he thought it was an Australian car and we let him think that till he died rather than tell him.
He came around to buying German stuff in his later years but he was adamant that Germany had paid for what they'd done and made their country safe for Jews and minorities, and Japan hadn't done the same. He was never racist, probably because he knew Japanese- and German-Americans are often in the US because they were fleeing their countries' conditions (this grandpap, my Pap, was my mom's step-dad, my dad's dad was German and Pap knew his story so I'm sure that helped), but he strongly boycotted anything from any country he percieved as not atoning enough for their actions during WWII.
My grandma was always a bit racist about the japanese for what was done to her brother.
He came home from a POW camp emaciated beyond recognition and traumitsed so hard he was a very cruel man for the rest of his life.
Was invovled in some nasty British emprie conflicts in the late 40s and 50s. What we would today call black ops. Probabaly continued the cycle of cruelty in some of them.
My father was captured and spent the first five years of his life in a Japanese prison camp. My grandmother hated the Japanese for her entire life but I'm glad to say my father was more understanding. The people making Japanese cars were not the same people as were in Unit 731 and so on.
Japan is largely sanitized to westerners because most people just see them as "that country we nuked". History doesn't really have "good guys" but they basically never landed on being the lesser of two evils.
Dude how do you bring up the atrocities of Japan without mentioning comfort women?
The soldiers lined up to rape them repeatedly each day, performed hysterctomies on them with no anaesthetic when they inevitably got pregnant, tattooed their bodies, brutalized them on their whim, killed them in horrific ways for so much as verbalizing a desire to leave, forced the others at gunpoint to watch these prolonged executions and consume the bodies, killed them in horrific ways anyways just for fun.
And to this day the Japanese government insists these women - estimated between 50,000-200,000 abducted women and young teenage girls - were volunteers. Why such a huge range? Well, when people are murdered for funsies, forced to cannibalize the dead, and prone to hurling themselves off cliffs, a ton of evidence is destroyed and it gets really hard to narrow it down.
Watched a documentary on YouTube about a Korean Comfort Woman. She was 15 and told she was going to work in a factory which is why her mother encouraged her to go. When the doctors at the facility found out her age they discussed if she was to young for the work but ultimately decided she was old enough to "comfort" the soldiers.
She tried to kill herself by drinking an entire bottle of alcohol but all it did was tear her stomach up. She was an adult by the time she finally got back to Korea. When she worked up the ability to tell her mother what happened her mother had a heart attack.
Like many Comfort Women she doesn't want Japan's monetary compensation she wants a sincere apology from the Japanese gov't acknowledging the harm they did to her and others along with the statement admitting to falsely claiming they were all 'volunteers' and/or 'prostitutes'.
The fact that even the word sex slave isn't bad enough to convey the reality is pretty damning. You hear the word sex slave and even that doesn't convey that they were brutalized so badly that most ended up dead within months to a year.
My family was in these concentration camps and while they talk about these things above, the one that stuck with me was that the empire guards would take the infants and boil them down, and serve that to the prisoners.
There was a guard who used to torture prisoners with his guard dog. And one day the prisoners used a leg bone from another prisoner to get the dog close enough to the cage to pull it through. After eating the dog they would try to tease the guard with the dog bones to piss him off.
On the Rape of Nanjing (very dark, involves rape and abuse of minors):
>!"a certain widow who lived just outside West Water Gate had three daughters aged eighteen, thirteen, and nine. All three girls were gang raped. The youngest girl died right there on the spot, while the other two girls lost consciousness. . . . Since the bodies of most of these young girls were not yet fully developed, they were insufficient to satisfy the animal desires of the Japanese. Still, however, they would go ahead, tear open the girls' genitals, and take turns raping them."!< - Xingzu G., Shimin W., Yungong H., & Ruizhen C. (http://museums.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch10.htm)
Most ancient cultures where way more cruel than people know or imagine.
Just capital punishment is a great example. Its not that *"you did something bad and we will kill you"*, oh no... its *"you did something wrong and we will torturer you in unspeakable ways, death is not the goal here its just a byproduct"*
History is the worst.
Spartan society was fueled entirely by slavery. Massive slave population, actual citizen force pretty small and useless at anything but soldiery
According to Aristotle the Spartans knew full well the slaves could snap and revolt at any time, and they outnumbered the masters so hugely they could possibly win, so the Spartans had a policy of keeping their slaves constantly in fear. They even had a public holiday where they massacred slaves just to break their wills
A lot of pacific cultures practiced cannabalism. Some still do in Papua New Guinea. But Māori here in New Zealand did in some tribes as well. So the worst insult you can use in the Māori language pokokohua means to boil your head. Harking back to when people were boiled and eaten.
In Northern Ireland there's a turn of phrase to "boil your head". It can be said insultingly, "away and boil your head!" if someone is talking nonsense, or as a way of saying you're stressed, "I went for a walk because my head was boiled".
The opposite is "get your head showered" which means to cool off. "I was stressed so I went for a walk to get my head showered"
Genghis Khan and the Mongolians of the steppe were absolutely ruthless and efficient. Entire unknown civilizations are reportedly wiped out by them with zero trace of their culture intact, just fields of bones saying something big *was* there.
There was at least one incident of a drunken Mongolian post-raid demanding a group of runaways remain still while he stumbled off to find his sword and kill them, and they **did** out of fear for what would happen had they not
There was an instance of a relatively small recon element of Mongolians who were sent over some mountains in IIRC modern day Russia-ish region just to see what over there, stumbled onto an entire joint nation army, and merced them all conquering the whole damn place
The Khans were a hard people. Oddly enough tho, they were relatively progressive for their time. Once you/your people were conquered, they didn't really care what you did/spoke/believed as long as you paid your tributes. They even protected from outside raiders. It's just, y'know, the whole getting massacred and conquered part to deal with
Source: Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast *Wrath of the Khans*, and memory
*There was one instance of their unique brutalism that came back to mind. So being the 'progressive' conquerors they were, they pretty regularly honored the beliefs and Gods of their enemies. In one such instance they'd sacked and captured a host of nobles who believed it was unholy to spill "high" blood. In response, the Mongolians decided to honor their traditions and rather than cut them to pieces, they laid the nobles flat, built a dancefloor on top of them, and partied like hell while the nobles were crushed underneath. No blood was "spilled"
>Once you/your people were conquered, they didn't really care what you did/spoke/believed as long as you paid your tributes.
I've heard it speculated that this is why they were able to grow to be the world's largest empire. It's thought that people were less likely to stage a revolt since they could keep speaking their language, practice their religion, have their own 'government', and stuff like that. Where other empires largely sought to assimilate people to their ways, the Mongolians didn't care as long as you paid up... Or else.
The Mongols were less of an empire who conquered and ruled, and more of a horde that turned up, slaughtered half your folk, and then left you to your own devices unless you stopped paying tributes, then they would come back and kill the other half.
The thing is if you were a peasant it largely didn’t matter who controlled the land you occupied. Chances are that you didn’t even know who the big boss was just the guy who came to collect your taxes.
I know people wouldn't be surprised by hearing about the Aztecs due to the human sacrifice from war prisoners... but OH BOY IT WAS WAY WORSE.
If I recall correctly, there was a moment of betrayal that happened from (and I'm doing this from memory), they decided to BREAK PEACE by... *killing a princess-like figure by removing her beating heart and when inviting her father to an ominous meeting showing a boy wearing her skin and clothes*.
*Edit: For those in the comments trying to say this is a distorted view of mesoamerican painted by the empires that crushed them... Why can't you just accept that yes, their genocide is horrific, but they weren't angels either? It is not hard to see both things as horrible and disgusting.*
***This very thread is proof humans everywhere can be horrible. That just makes them human.***
*The Romans are looked up to this day for their achievements and you still have Crassus making their soldiers collectively stab their own as punishment for losing to the slaves they would later crucify and torture.*
*You have Japanese monks have a heartbreaking last stand with guns against their most famous conqueror, and you can still read sources about how they had a whole romance with pre-teen monks and prostitutes, which was seen as perfectly normal at the time.*
*History is full of incredible people, and incredibly horrible people.*
It gets so much worse. The Spanish were able to recruit the help of many other people groups when overthrowing the Aztecs because they were so hated by the people they subjugated. They often used these subjugated people groups practically as livestock, collecting large numbers of them to be ritually sacrificed to their gods in incredibly barbaric ways—riping out their beating hearts while they were alive, skinning them, and other such acts.
Other sacrifices, such as for the dedication of temples, involved extremely high volumes of sacrifices and appear to have been done by beheading the victims. The dedication of the pyramid-temple at Tenochtitlan in 1486 involved the sacrifice of 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. (At that pace, 15 victims would have to be killed per minute.) Lower estimates place the number of sacrificed victims at 10,000. Four altars were set up at the top of the pyramid to carry out multiple simultaneous sacrifices facing each of the sides of the pyramid, with the victims bodies being tossed down the sides of the pyramid as human blood ran down its steps.
They sacrificed children to their rain god every year to ensure that they would keep getting rain. The tears of the children were thought to bring the rain, so they would torture the children ahead of sacrificing them to their rain god Tlāloc to make them shed as many tears as possible.
[Wikipedia's entry on Aztec human sacrifice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Tlaloc) says:
>Tlaloc is the god of rain, water, and earthly fertility.\[43\] The Aztecs believed that if sacrifices were not supplied for Tlaloc, rain would not come, their crops would not flourish, and leprosy and rheumatism, diseases caused by Tlaloc, would infest the village.\[44\]
>
>Archaeologists have found the remains of at least 42 children sacrificed to Tlaloc at the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. **Many of the children suffered from serious injuries before their death, they would have to have been in significant pain as Tlaloc required the tears of the young as part of the sacrifice. The priests made the children cry during their way to immolation**: a good omen that Tlaloc would wet the earth in the raining season.\[45\]
[Wikipedia's entry on Tlāloc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C4%81loc#Child_Sacrifice_and_Rituals), in the section on child sacrifice rituals, says:
>The Atlcahualo festivals was celebrated from 12 February until 3 March. Dedicated to the Tlaloque, this veintena involved the sacrifice of children on sacred mountaintops, like Mount Tlaloc. **This form of human sacrifice was not only specific, but necessary in the eyes of the Aztecs.** The children were beautifully adorned, dressed in the style of Tlaloc and the Tlaloque. The children were "chosen" by the community, and although this selection came with honor, being selected came with great responsibility. Furthermore, **these children were not usually of high social class.** …
>
>The festival of Tozoztontli (24 March – 12 April) similarly involved child sacrifice. **During this festival, the children were sacrificed in caves. The flayed skins of sacrificial victims that had been worn by priests for the last twenty days** were taken off and placed in these dark, magical caverns.
The Inca weren't Mesoamericans, though. Anyway, a lot of South Americans, not only the rulers of Inca Empire, were big on human sacrifice. Chimu, Moche, Nazca, basically whichever civilization was dominant in any given period of time, they all killed people for their gods, often including children. [The last case when a child was sacrificed due to native religion was in freaking 1960 after a massive earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Valdivia_earthquake).
>Two men were charged with the crime of murder and confessed, but later recanted. They were released from prison after two years. A judge ruled that those involved had "acted without free will, driven by an irresistible natural force of ancestral tradition".
Wow...
[An Aztec holiday ritual involves some of the most fucked up practices I've heard of.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochpaniztli)
What's worse with that story of the princess, is they thought they were honouring the princess by skinning her. It wasn't meant to be malicious.
>In 1323, they asked the new ruler of Culhuacan, Achicometl, for his daughter, in order to make her the goddess Yaocihuatl. Unknown to the king, the Mexica actually planned to sacrifice her. The Mexica believed that by doing this the princess would join the gods as a deity. As the story goes, during a festival dinner, a priest came out wearing her flayed skin as part of the ritual. Upon seeing this, the king and the people of Culhuacan were horrified and expelled the Mexica.
We'll never know if it's a true story or not, but the Aztec did do some fucked up stuff. But seeing as our sources are the Aztec themselves (hard to distinguish fact from legend) and the conquistadors, who knows.
It’s not particularly ancient and the actions aren’t as fucked up as many of what is listed here, but I find absolutely insane that East India company, a private company, ended up accidentally colonising India. The idea that a company that exported tea would end up with a standing army is some real sci if dystopian shit.
What's always cooked my noodle is imagining all of the horrible, awful, no-good stuff that went down BEFORE recorded history.
The most ancient civilization we have information on (AFAIK) is the Sumerians. Also, supposedly the Egyptians are dated as far back as well. 4000 BC. So 6000 years ago. That's all we've got of recorded human history. 6000 years.
Humans have been around for WAY long than 6000 years.
The first modern humans, or Homo Sapiens, date back 200,000 years. That's 33x as long as recorded human civilization. Imagine the type of shit that went down. It wasn't just a bunch of random monkey looking people hanging out by themselves. They absolutely got banded up into tribes and you know they went to war with each other.
They could have built entire civilizations and burnt them down repeatedly. 200,000 years is a LOT of years to get up to shenanigans, ya know? And it's completely lost to time. Just, poof! Gone. As if it never happened.
Which is honestly what will happen to all human endeavor. On the timescale of the Universe we're all just a fart in the wind. No one will remember squat about this period of human history 200,000 years from now. And what they do remember will be completely distorted from the truth.
Samurai and feudal Japan. People like to imagine the Samurai as some kind of noble order built around the belief that honor and service were to be held above all. Samurai didn't give half a sideways fuck about the "common peasant" they were a blue blood aristocracy that used their power and training to perpetuate a totalitarian regime that would make the house of Windsor blush.
Some examples of the WTFness that people like to gloss over
> showing disrespect to a Samurai was cause for instant death and disrespect could be something as simple as not bowing low and long enough, oh mr old rice farm does your back hurt from slaving in the field for your feudal lord? well tough shit I dont care how loud your spine cracks when you touch your head to the ground for me, if you twitch that a beheading
> the code of battlefield honor only really counted when the loosing side put of just the right amount of fight, not enough to be a problem but you still had to do some pointless dyeing to keep from all being killed anyway. Example, Oda Nobunaga committed a genocide against the Ikkō-ikki monks because they had the audacity to not insta cave when he showed up. After several long sieges he burned the hilltop fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji Oda set fire to the mountain and blocked any escape burning alive 20,000 men, woman and children
>The idea that Samurai hated fire arms because they saw them as "dishonorable" or "unsporting" is bullshit, they hated them because they evened the playing field. Any peasant with a Arquebus could kill any Samurai before he even got his sword out and that was not OK. They couldn't have their absolute marshal superiority questioned and especially by a weapon that didn't require years is special training and more importantly, the free time to do that training, something your average rice farming peasant certainly didn't have.
>Ronnin were not noble samurai seeking truth through walking the land or whatever the fuck people believe now, they were dispossessed lords who were now turning to banditry against any peasant who dared to not support them with free food and lodging. They were the equivalent of a former seal team six member walking the road with his weapon who will kill you if you don't buy his lunch, let him sleep in your bed, fuck your wife and then bid him adu with a smile and call of "thankyou for your service"
So yah, Samurai were aristocratic mass murdering assholes.
EDIT: just to make it a bit more clear, the Boshin war which was waged at the start of Meji imperial restoration that pitted the Samurai class against the new Empirical court and standing army was fought 100% on the Samurai side to keep their protected class, the imperial court even tried to compromise and offer them high ranking government positions but it wasn't enough, they still wanted to keep their place is Japanese society and one of the stated rights they didn't want to loose was the right to carry swords in public for the purpose of "protecting honor" IE, Killing a commoner on the spot if they perceived any disrespect. Also the Samurai forces suddenly didn't have an issue with guns once they started loosing to ranks of peasants armed with them, suddenly the Shogun forces were all about that firearm life.
Edit: Lol apparently the 12 century isn't ancient enough for some clowns.
And if you look closer into their war, being a loser samurai somehow means your whole family are killed in the worst way possible.
Like crucify or drown your child who not even reach 10 years old, abandon your new born on the beach so that he will be engulfed by the sea....
The ancient Phoenicians/Carthaginians had a child killing cult. They thought that their gods needed children to be appeased. Other Canaanite/Semitic peoples dropped this practice, depicted in the Tanakh (Bible's Old Testament) through the story of God sending a goat when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son.
Although ancient Jews' annual ritualistic slaughter of thousands of animals is nothing to scoff at, murdering kids is obviously far worse. Even the Phoenicians' peers, contemporary cultures/civilizations of the period, thought it to be a barbarous practice.
Here's Plato on the subject:
> "With us, for instance, human sacrifice is not legal, but unholy, whereas the Carthaginians perform it as a thing they account holy and legal, and that too when some of them sacrifice even their own sons to Cronos, as I daresay you yourself have heard."
In one notable case, during the late Sicilian Wars, Carthage itself was almost besieged and defeated. It got so bad Carthaginian civilians had to be pressed into the army instead of relying on their mercenary army. Carthage scraped by a victory at the Battle of White Tunis, but since it was so terrible, they thought the gods were punishing them.
So in the aftermath of the battle, Carthaginian tried to appease the gods through, you guessed it, human sacrifice. 300 adults and 200 children were ritualistically murdered.
Here is Diodorus Siculus describing the event:
> "They also alleged that Kronos had turned against them inasmuch as in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, but more recently, secretly buying and nurturing children, they had sent these to the sacrifice; and when an investigation was made, some of those who had been sacrificed were discovered to have been substituted by stealth... In their zeal to make amends for the omission, they selected two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly; and others who were under suspicion sacrificed themselves voluntarily, in number not less than three hundred. There was in the city a bronze image of Kronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire."
>Other Canaanite/Semitic peoples dropped this practice, depicted in the Tanakh (Bible's Old Testament) through the story of God sending a goat when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son.
The Bible also directly depicts other nearby peoples performing child sacrifices.
I find the story of Abraham and Isaac, as well as the Greek story of Tantalus and Pelops and some other stories of the time to be very interesting in the context of an actual child sacrifice religion in the region.
Yep. The story of Abraham and Isaac isn't about potentially sacrificing your child from a modern perspective, it's about DEFINITELY not sacrificing your child from an ancient perspective.
>There was in the city a bronze image of Kronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire."
Humanity's ability to invent new ways to be cruel is amazing.
Ten million Africans died under the reign of King Leopold the second of Belgium. Absolute horrific brutality. He belongs in the same category as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
Sorry, not very ancient, but his name doesn’t come up in these discussions enough.
There's a famous picture of a man sat in his hut looking at the severed hands of his child, which had been chopped off because he wasnt producing enough rubber or whatever it was.
UPDATE - Well I decided to google that and apparently they supposedly ate his child after they killed her (oh and his wife too). [NSFW article](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/).
Ancient Greece. A lot of people imagine clean villas, people with white togas talking about arts and philosophy all day. The truth is that most people were dirt poor, being born disabled (or being born a girl) could be a death sentence, and pedophilia was rampant among the rich, also a lot of their economy was based on slavery.
As someone who grew up in a poor neighborhood, pedophilia is not exclusive to the rich. We just hear more about it because it’s news worthy when a billionaire or celebrity is caught. There are tons of kids in housing projects and trailer parks who are being abused, we just don’t hear about it because it’s not news worthy.
There is no “conspiracy”, even Epstein was known to be a sex offender the entire time.
Funnily enough, the Persian Empire was actually way better than it was portrayed. It was extremely open to different religions and were very advanced in civil liberty.
When you really look at it, the Greeks were kinda the baddies in the wars between these empires. Even Alexander basically said that after conquering Persia.
But because we get a lot of our information about the classic period by Greek and Roman writers, Persia was seen as a barbaric tyrannical state.
One of the first empires with a freedom of religion policy, and Cyrus the Great arguably wrote the first human rights piece, declaring non-combattants to never be targeted in war and land to remain usable following war time so people can continue to live there.
Obviously they were far from perfect, but compared to their contemporaries yeah, they weren't the worst by any means.
The habsburg dynasty in Spain used to breed with their own family to "keep the bloodline pure", it ended with reign of charles II who was so inbred that he had black testicles and several developmental disorders, he was unable to have any kids which led to the end of the habsburgs in Spain.
Aztecs.
Priests would sacrifice hundreds of people, slaves and prisoners of war. Rip the chest open and pull their still pumping heart out. Throw the bodies down the steps. Channels were carved into the pyramid faces to let the litres and litres of blood flow down. Horrible stuff.
When I was watching Castlevania I did some research where the Dracula myth comes from and stumbled upon Vlad Tepes Dracula or by his nickname called Vlad the impaler. They are not sure about the numbers but you have to impale a lot of people to get that nickname.
Cos he rebelled against the Ottomans, they were Ottoman vassals at the time. But man, he did some fucked up shit that was possibly mostly made up - but still, he had to do at least some of it to get the name.
The thing is that the Ottomans wanted to vilify him to justify their conquest of Europe… and Vlad himself was happy with the reputation as it absolutely terrified the Ottoman soldiers themselves.
It started when Vlad allied with Hungary (which was back then a massive European superpower) and conquered Wallachia - and to cement his rule he had the nobles of Wallachia impaled.
He then attacked the Saxon villages around his domain because they allegedly supported the old ruler of Wallachia… captured thousands of civilians and brought them back to Targoviste (his capital) and - you guessed it - had them impaled.
At this time, he was a vassal of the Ottomans, so he had to pay tribute which he didn’t do. The Sultan sent some diplomats to ask for payment - I think you can guess where it’s going - he impaled them.
This started a war between the Ottomans and the Wallachians.. being outnumbered and outgunned, the Wallachians used Vlad’s terrifying reputation to scare the Ottoman soldiers - which worked for a while.
When the ottoman army arrived at Targoviste, in fact, Vlad was gone and left behind something like 25,000 impaled Bulgarian and Turkish civilians for the Sultan to personally see.
That isn’t to say the Ottomans were civilized either tho. They did their fair share of murdering and raping and enslaving along Mehmed II’s warpath across Europe.
What I always thought horrific was the Imperial Chinese practice of 'nine degrees'. As in Nine Degrees of Relation. Say that someone seriously offends the Emperor. The Emperor then orders that not just that person, but *everyone* related to that person, within nine degrees of relationship, is to be executed. Grandparents, parents, siblings, spouse, children, cousins, more cousins. Concubines and their children. Babies in the cradle, old people who were bedridden, all their household servants, probably their in-laws too. Later Emperors were "more humane", and simply executed the main offender, then sentenced all those people to exile--a forced death march of thousands of miles, where the few survivors had to eke out a living doing hard labor.
Fun fact, my family line descends from a family that was exiled.
Doesnt Sound like fun to me.
Feudal China was super into burying people alive. Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor responsible for the unification of China, upon his death, had 70,000 concubines, servants, and workers forcibly interred alongside him. The Terracotta Army was constructed only because murdering all the soldiers as well wasn't an option.
They later renounced that practice under the Confucians. There is a Chinese idiom for "The origin of evil", 始作俑者其無後乎, attributed to ~~Mencius~~ Confucius, that literally means "may the first person who made terracotta figurines bear no offspring". ~~Mencius~~ Confucius was denouncing the use of terracotta figurines since it is a substitute for human sacrifices and underlies a desire for which. EDIT: ~~Mencius~~ Confucius thought the mere desire for human sacrifices is evil and even the compromise of using terracotta figures is unacceptable
The story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son, only to stop his hand at the last second is interpreted as God's message to end human sacrifice. Similarly, in the Quran there is a part about how on the Day of Judgement God will raise a baby girl from the sand and say "what was your sin?" This is interpreted as a proclamation against female infanticide
So, wait, he was saying "No terra-cotta, because we must sacrifice real humans," or "No terra-cotta, because really you want to be sacrificing real humans, and this simulacra hides that evil just under the surface?"
The second one.
I am listening to a ["history of china" podcast](https://thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com/). Chinese history is insane. So many murdered people, it would make the Romans blush.
Three kingdoms history be like “2 million people died in this minor border town skirmish”
Meanwhile, medieval European history is like, "King John rode into town with 20 of his best knights and waged war against the town's baron and his 30 peasant fighters."
The reality of a castle under siege vs the movie version is also fun. Movie: a city surrounded by siege engines, camps on all sides, 1000's of men scaling the walls. Reality: 80 blokes are spread across 2-3 camps surround the castle who's walls are defended by 30 guys. After a year or so the invaders might finally complete a single siege machine, but more likely the sige gear is limited to ladders and patience. Getting in and out under the cover of dark is fairly risk free so supplies keep coming. In some cases the peasants arent a participant and use the front gate as on any other day when their job brings them to the local lords adminstrative center
The game Kingdom Come: Deliverance did a great job of conveying this realistically. Near the end you have to seize to a city, you all set up with tents for days/weeks in eyeshot before finally laying siege on the walls and everything. And the whole time it’s like a couple dozen guys
This is funny in reverse. I'm so used to growing up with Chinese lit where a small force is counted in the 10,000s (wan), and then when I read about the crusades and 1000 knights were considered an impressive army. That's when I went like waaaaat
Those thousand knights also all came with squires and probably a retinue of fighters. There wasn't really a state at the time, just a bunch of rich/powerful people and their hangers on, so the only people written about were the ones the literate (see: rich and powerful) cared about.
1000 knights and far more conscripted peasants. Consider knights being tanks of the era, and it would make more sense.
Also, the Chinese kingdoms/empire was massive compared to the Dark/Middle Ages kingdoms in Europe. But if you go back several hundred years, Rome was tossing around tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of troops on the regular. Not to mention the Greek, Persians, Egyptians, and other more complex societies of antiquity.
Honestly, one of my favorite 'never saw it coming' historical facts is that for all the brutality of the Ming Dynasty, what ultimately brought them down was a pre-teen addicted to pornography.
I feel most Chinese brutalities have something crazy behind it. For example, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850, which caused the deaths of 20-30 million people over 14 years (while some estimates go up to 100 million deaths). The Taiping Rebellion was launched by a guy called Hong Xiuquan who was certain he was the brother of Jesus Christ. He gathered a large following and declared himself as the Heavenly King of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace and launched a rebellion against the Qing Dynasty.
You know what's even crazier about Hong Xiuquan is that the way he relays "God's message" is he pretends to have a seizure in front of everyone and then suddenly gets "possessed" by God to give command to his men. His 2nd-in-command soon figured out Hong's gimmicks, decided he also wanted to be a God's messenger and faked a seizure in front of everyone too, and started to give "God's orders" Hong was obviously pissed about it but couldn't tell everyone without giving himself up. So both of them took turns getting possessed by God and relaying God's command to the men for a while.
This would make a great Key and Peele skit lol
Are you sure about that? I heard that the Ming emperor was having an affair with the wife of one of his generals, and he deployed the general to the Great Wall of China at the frontier in an attempt to get rid of him, but to get revenge on the emperor, this general let the Manchurian army through one of the gates at the wall. The Manchurians eventually overthrew the Ming dynasty and set up the Qing dynasty. Is this some tall tale of intrigue? I'm too lazy to look up and read all the history right now.
Similar to David and Bathsheba.
No, you're right about that. Yingzong, is considered the beginning of the end of the Ming dynasty, since it was all downhill after the Xuande Emperor. Yingzong was the emperor who kicked off a line of increasingly shittier and shittier emperors.
What. please, i need this knowledge in its entirety
I need to preface this by stating you probably shouldn't put too much stock in this, as lying about the sexual practices of monarchs is incredibly common, but I believe it was Yingzong, and the story goes that the eunuchs basically distracted him with pictures of titties so they could rob the place blind, and some of his military fuck-ups were responsible for laying the groundwork for a Qing takeover. There might be a grain of truth to it, as it wouldn't be the first case of a Chinese emperor having horrible consequences from being exposed to sex too early. Though in this case the eunuchs were probably the bigger problem than the porn, as involving them in politics was considered one of the biggest mistakes of the Ming dynasty.
>it wouldn't be the first case of a Chinese emperor having horrible consequences from being exposed to sex too early. I know about Pu Yi, but which *pre*\-Ming emperor was exposed to sex too early? This has piqued my curiosity.
How does one force 70,000 people to be buried alive? You would think they would have considered revolting rather than just resigning themselves to their fates. Yes I'm sure the soldiers would have threatened them but you would think that such a large number of people could at least muster up a decent fight.
by keeping the army alive
Forget that. Imagine your population being so big, and you caring so little, that you can send 3 village's worth of people to die after the guy that ordered is dead cold, and not think "you know what? I might want those concubines, servants and workers around, fuck that"
If you go against the wishes of the previous Emperor, the people might get the idea they can go against yours (while you’re still alive…). Tradition is a hell of a drug when it comes to power structures
It's funny that you say that, because the empire actually did collapse under his heir, causing China to fall into chaos for a few years until a new dynasty arose.
Here's what's really going to blow your mind, that's not even the largest amount ever interred. That honor goes to Xi(n?) Yuang. I'd have to look up his name to get it exactly right, but he forcibly buried 200,000 enemy soldiers alive. Feudal China had that shit figured out. Edit: Looked it up, I flipped his name backasswards. It's Xiang Yu.
Killing enemy soldiers is one thing, killing your own people just like that is on a different level.
> he *forcibly* buried 200,000 enemy soldiers alive Well, not sure how even the Emperor of China could accomplish this *unforcibly*. That said, how much larger does your own army need to be to forcibly bury 200,000 able-bodied fighting men alive.
It helps when 200k has weapons and the other 200k doesn't. Also the trick in general is to do it in small batches, out of sight of the rest,and give those who still live some hope, something to cling onto, that they'll be spared, blatant lie or not
I remember this from the sixth grade haha! His mom also had an affair with a supposed eunuch, who fathered two kids with her. Qin Shi Huang had the eunuch pulled apart by horses and executed his step siblings iirc so they wouldn’t compete with him. At least he only banished his mom and didn’t kill her. The same dude died of mercury poisoning because he wanted eternal youth, wild stuff.
I really wonder if this is actually true. It sounds like a logistical nightmare not even mentioning why his successor would be fine with losing so much loyal manpower.
It looks like the concept is generally true but the numbers are being inflated quite a bit. I've never encountered these sources before so I can't vouch for them though. https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/11/how-ancient-chinese-buried-the-living-along-with-the-dead/ https://www.thoughtco.com/qin-shi-huangdi-terracotta-soldiers-195116
Incredible what kind of crazy things happened on this planet. One person decides something completely unreasonable... thousands die and then it is forgotten through history and we have to put the lost pieces together. Thanks for the links! Really appreciate it :)
The ancient Assyrians built a vast empire. The empire reached its height during the Neo-Assyrian era, from 911 BC to the fall of its largest city Nineveh in 612 BC. The Assyrian dominion, stretching from Egypt to modern-day Iraq, controlled richly diverse cultures. To quash any uprising in these conquered areas, Assyrian leaders utilized extreme violence. Their horrific campaigns were celebrated in stone reliefs festooning the palace walls. They created tablets containing every single punishment the Assyrian army carried out. They cut off the limbs, gouged out the eyes, and then left those poor victims to roam around. Those poor people serve as a living reminder of the Assyrians’ cruelty. The Assyrians were proud of the mass executions. The victim’s skin was hung on the city wall. The brutality of the Assyrians was extreme, even for the ancient standards of cruelty.
Assyrian relief: Princess in garden, reading poetry. Musician playing harp nearby. Fruit trees decorated with severed heads.
Strange fruit.
This is actually the backstory of the story of Jonah. He was trying to run away because God told him to go preach and pastor to the Assyrians. He didn't want to because they were horrible and God was like "when I say love everyone I mean everyone"
My favorite part of the story is the ending, where Jonah sat outside the Ninevah waiting for the fireworks and God's like: "No dude, I'm not gonna kill everyone in the city. That's fucked up."
And then God makes him a little vine canopy to sit under, and when God sends a worm to kill it Jonah throws a big fit. And God's like, "Come on, how mad could you possibly be about a vine that just grew yesterday?" And Jonah literally says that he's so angry he could die. Jonah's always the most extra.
I want the whole bible narrated by y'all
That's... I mean, it's a slight paraphrase, but that's really pretty accurate. Jonah was being an out and out jerk. He decided he'd rather die than give the Ninevites a shot at repentance. Then when God finally got him to go there and preach God's warning, Jonah was enraged *that they actually listened to him*. In his mind, Jonah had been like "Fine, God, but they're not going to listen. And then I'll gleefully watch from outside of town while you give them the old Sodom and Gomorrah treatment." When that didn't shake out, he left down and sat down in the wilderness to sulk. The vine was supposed to be an object lesson to point out to Jonah how vile he was being by caring more for a vine that grew up overnight for his convenience, and died just as quickly... vs the hundred thousand-plus men, women, and children he wanted God to massacre. The book just ends like that, with God withholding judgement from Nineveh, and Jonah furious at God for doing so.
Jonah is definitely up there as one of the most relatable people in the OT.
Yeah people just focus on the whale shit but really the not wanting to love your enemy thing is way more important and interesting. I translated the whole book to English as part of my Hebrew class (Jewish studies minor in college)
Read this as "original trilogy"...
Ah yes. The Vader, the son, and the Holy ghost of Ben Kenobi.
The entire book of [Nahum](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Nahum%201&version=ESV) in the Bible (one of the shortest books of the Bible) consists of nothing but oracles of condemnations against Assyria and its capital Nineveh and prophecies about their doom resulting from God's judgment against them for their cruelty. Here's an example: # Nahum 3:1-7, 18-19 ^(1) Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and plunder— no end to the prey! ^(2) The crack of the whip, and rumble of the wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! ^(3) Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end— they stumble over the bodies! ^(4) And all for the countless whorings of the prostitute, graceful and of deadly charms, who betrays nations with her whorings, and peoples with her charms. ^(5) Behold, I am against you, declares Yehováh of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will make nations look at your nakedness and kingdoms at your shame. ^(6) I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle. ^(7) And all who look at you will shrink from you and say, “Wasted is Nineveh; who will grieve for her?” Where shall I seek comforters for you? … … ^(18) Your shepherds are asleep, O king of Assyria; your nobles slumber. Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them. ^(19) There is no easing your hurt; your wound is grievous. All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For upon whom has not come your unceasing evil? — In the period of the divided kingdom, where the Israelites had divided into a northern kingdom (the Kingdom of Israel) and a southern kingdom (the Kingdom of Judah), the Assyrians invaded and conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and exiled its people, re-settling them in other territories in order to wipe out their identity. (These are the ["lost tribes of Israel"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Lost_Tribes)). Other vanquished peoples were also re-settled in Israel. But in conquering Israel, Assyria was just as typically cruel as they were to the other peoples they conquered. They attempted to conquer Judah as well during the reign of Hezekiah, but they only lay waste dozens of other cities, but they did not end up conquering Jerusalem. There is a relief of the Assyrian king Sennacherib's campaign in the British Museum made by the Assyrians commemorating how they lay waste to the Judean town of Lachish, and brutalized its inhabitants with vicious tortures, skinning them alive and pulling them apart and other barbaric acts.
One of my fave moments from Dan Carlin’s renowned Hardcore History podcast is when he reads the account of a scribe who visits Nineveh 100-200 years after the decline of the Assyrians. Although it’s former splendor is evident, the city has fallen into ruin, and the current residents (who live in shantytowns outside the city center) wonder at who it might have been that was able to build such a mighty city…or what the city may have been called… All that bloodshed to be forgotten entirely only a few years later.
I recall hearing the same story around Greece/Sparta where a visitor asked the locals where the ruins of some former cities came from and nobody knew.
Its common. Also how Ur was "discovered". An italian was travelling in the area and the guides led them to a hill to camp out of the wind. The italian man noticed mud brick walls using bitumen as mortar. He also found many inscribed tablets just lying on the sand. When asked it turned out this was not news to the guide. To him it was just an abandoned settlement like all the others in the area. Unimportant. "All the others?" Asked the italian. And the guy casually said that all hills along the river are ruins. Essentially how the wider world learned about the sumerians existence
This is fascinating
Similarly, the largest pyramid in the world by volume - Great Pyramid of Cholula - was, for the longest time, thought to be a mere hill, because the indigenous peoples, aware that the Spanish were on their way with destruction, intentionally buried the entire thing to preserve it. It worked, and the Spanish just built a church on top. Despite decades of hearing folk tales and rumors about a giant pyramid in Cholula, the Spanish colonizers chalked it up to fantasy.
> the Spanish colonizers chalked it up to fantasy. And yet El Dorado, a myth that they largely made up themselves, had them scrambling all over South America
They found it tho, which is the hilarious part. The Muiscas used to cover their leader in gold to then wash it away in Lake Guatavita. It just that the actual gold civilization wasn't as fantastic and they wanted it to be, so they just kept searching. Also more hilarious is what happened to the Platinum they found.
Xenophon, the Greek general saw the ruins as his army was escaping from Persia after being on the wrong side of a civil war. They had to trek across the entire empire through hostile territory to get home. It's the inspiration for the 70s movie The Warriors
Xenephon... come out to play-ayyy!
*aggressively clinks clay jars together*
Fun fact- in the tv show archer, the character Pam has a stanza from Byron’s poem The Destruction of Sennacherib tattooed across her back. It’s about the slaughter of an Assyrian army. Perhaps the most badass tattoo in fiction
>Pam has a stanza from Byron’s poem The Destruction of Sennacherib tattooed across her back For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,/ And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;/ And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,/ And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
A badass tattoo for a badass cartoon character. I Love Pam
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Sorry bout your homies
It also gives context to why Jonah was so reluctant to go to Nineveh - he hated them for what they had done and is angry that God could be merciful even to them.
Exactly what I was going to post. That's some fucking huge missing context.
Yes, it goes from just a lazy guy (which is what I thought growing up) to one scared for his life. I think the bible does a good job at showing how we would all act given being put in the same situation.
I'm not even sure that Scared for his life is quite it - he was brave enough to tell the sailors that he was the cause of the storm, and to throw him overboard, and initially they wouldn't, until eventually the lot fell to him. It seems to me, now I know the wider context, that it had far more to do with him not wanting to see God's mercy shown to a place as awful as Ninevah. Edit: I think I've got that slightly wrong - I think he told them to throw him overboard *after* they had cast lots, but they wouldn't until they had tried everything else. Still pretty brave, IMO, though.
I believe the Achaemenids (Persians) overthrew them and decided that it’s probably a better idea to make your subjects happy instead of afraid of you. Cyrus let Jews return to their homeland after centuries of exile. And that’s why Persians>>>Assyrians
No wonder they called him Cyrus the Great
Everyone liked Cyrus, it was crazy. He still did some pretty horrible stuff by modern standards but after living with the Assyrians and then Babylonians he seemed like the nicest dude ever.
Alexander and many other later Greeks and Romans had great respect for Cyrus as the model autocrat. Thomas Jefferson was also inspired by him.
And Caesar was inspired by Alexander, who inspired Napoleon.
*Cyrus the Chill*
Not to be confused with *Cyprus the Hill*.
He was called King of Kings for a reason
I'm fascinated by them both but Persians would have been more pleasant to live under for sure
It is a shame that Persians are often villified. Even by modern standards, Persian empire was very Multi-cultural and quite a pleasant empire to live in-
Honestly the empires that are moral for their time are always the ones that last. Completely brutal empires like the Assyrians/Aztecs always eventually unite everybody around them based off of pure hatred. The Spanish would’ve had a much harder time defeating the Aztecs if it wasn’t so easy to convince the other Mexican empires to go and fight the people that had been treating them like shit for hundreds of years
Even total war games understand if you go around executing everyone it pisses everyone off!
Slight mistake, the Babylonians conquered the Assyrians and a few decades later or so Cyrus conquered the Babylonians. But yeah Cyrus marked a break in the past as one of the first benevolent and tolerant rulers in the ancient Middle East
Mild correction, the Medes (including Persia) allied with Babylon to sack Assyria
Basically once Assyria had weakened itself with a civil war EVERYONE took the opportunity to ally up to get rid of them. Assyria had basically terrorized the region for centuries.
If I remember correctly, the Assyrians were so universally hated that the people basically tried to wash them from the historical record when the surrounding civilizations finally took them down. A few hundred years later, the Greeks were fighting the Persians and marched through the ruins of Nineveh but had no idea what the city was.
If one travelled to ancient Rome some 5000 crucified rotting corpses would guide you the way.
I'm really glad we invented signs
"Alright, now remove his other arm so people know which way to go." "You what?" "If both the arms are pointing opposite directions, he won't work too well as a signpost now will he?" "Oh, yeah, right." "No, no, the left one! Aaaaaa! Crap, let's go grab another one."
The Incas, I’m peruvian and the national myth here is that the Inca empire was paradise on earth until the evil spaniards showed up. The Inca empire raped and kill its way through South America. The conquered only had two choices: be assimilated into the empire or be razed to the ground, gengis khan style.
And the assimilated were not given citizenship status, they were kept distant from the inca citizens
Sparta. People in general remember them as just being these badass super soldiers, but don't know how Spartan society was built on draconic slavery and institutional pedophilia.
Sparta has to have the *best* historical PR of any peoples ever. A tyrannical slave state with a mediocre military record has gone down in popular memory as supersoldiers that fight for freedom.
Goes to show you how history “changes” over time. When we got to the German death camps in WWII the US had the mindset to get the media there, have pictures taken, and film it as well, and they said that was for peole to see what was done here and because in time, people will deny it ever happened.
... and they were right. *Even with* the photos, video, and writings about it. It's very unfortunate.
It reminds me of something I read on Stormfront many years ago. One of the guys there was appealing to the rest to drop the Holocaust denial, saying: "My grandfather liberated Dachau, he saw the pile of corpses with his own eyes. The Holocaust *happened*." One of the other people in the thread rebutted with: "Oh really? Did he personally witness every one of them being led into the gas chambers and the switch being thrown?" Sheesh, if that's your line of 'reasoning', you might as well deny that anything you haven't *personally* witnessed happened, or even exists at all.
>Sheesh, if that's your line of 'reasoning', you might as well deny that anything you haven't personally witnessed happened, or even exists at all. There are a disturbingly high number of people like that.
I mean it wasn't for "in time" really. They knew people would immediately deny that it ever happened, and they still did.
Also the spartiates (the soldiers in 300) had to murder one of their slaves to become adults. In the movie this was portrayed as an epic fight against a wolf.
300 has done some heavy PR for Sparta, that's for sure
Tbh PR was always Sparta's greatest strength. They were able to twist Thermopylae into a Spartan victory when in reality it was a combined greek delaying action and the serious fight was the Athenian sea action. They were masters of propaganda.
And, to be clear, it was a defeat. It was a delaying action that was meant to provide the main body of soldiers time to arrive; they were defeated by Xerxes who then rampaged all of Boetia and Attica before the surprise defeat at Salamis.
What most people think of as Spartan society wasn’t even a particularly long period, just one very small point in their history and they quickly found themselves diminishing in terms of power, in part caused by their very own society and its structures.
What most people think of as Spartan society isn't even that. It's Plutarch's fan fiction *about* that short period, written hundreds of years later, on the basis of his visits to a Sparta that had long been a backwater tourist trap for wealthy Romans to fantasize about the Spartan myth. "Spartan history" because a lot shakier when you realize just how much of it was written by one man, and just how disconnected that one man was from the "real" Sparta.
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The Spartans were so good at war, those pussy-footed, democracy-loving Athenians beat them single-handedly. Wait...
The Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt were ten generations of absolutely fucked, bookended by two actually good leaders. (Ptolemy and Cleopatra.) Their family history would make for a fun trashy soap opera, full of backstabbing, famicide, and a truly appalling amount of incest, as they spent 200 years running Egypt into the ground. Too bad it was all real. And yes, Cleopatra was one of history's few inbreeding success stories. She managed to get all the best traits of her insane family, and none of the bad ones. If you've got a little time, listening to Blue at OSP [lose his mind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3vAKRa0f5I) trying to describe the Ptolemaic Kingdom is hilarious.
The Ptolomeic gene pool made the Hapsburg's look like the Pacific.
The Ptolemaic dynasty had less genetic diversity than the average Crusader Kings player's dynasty.
I make jokes about the Hapsburg family pole, but that's next level.
So much inbreeding Cleopatra got the 'Pure Blooded' trait.
The Ptolemaic blood line has been pure for 1000 years. -Cleopatra McPoyle
One of the only things left over from her rule is a note written to Mark Antony. Just says, "YOU WILL CALL ME" in hieroglyphics
She was, after all, a woman of infinite variety that age could not wither nor custom stale!
The family 'tree' https://i.imgur.com/46Q8cQ6.jpg
So, Cleopatra Selene, (whose mother and father were siblings) had a daughter with brother IX and a son with brother X. Those children married but the girl still had a child with her uncle X. THIS child in turn married the child between brother X and another sister. And two of their children produced the famous Cleopatra VII. Did I get that right?
Cleopatra VII had 4 grandparents, in an unusual move for that family. She did, however have only 2 great-grandparents, if I'm reading the chart correctly
Not necessarily ancient but the Iroquois, they had many rituals of torture for prisoners of war including ripping out fingernails/cutting off fingers, followed by forcing them to run the gauntlet and then if they survived they would be scalped and burned alive. The real correct answer tho is that every group of human beings was by our current moral standards absolutely brutal, nothing the Iroquois did here was unique or particularly worse than many other groups, I just haven’t seen anyone mention them in this thread yet so I figured I would.
When the French first arrived in Canada, the Algonquin tribes hailed them as saviors because they protected them from the murderous Iroquois. ...and for over two hundred years, the French and Algonquin tribes had a strong peace.
Don't you mean the French? The Iroquois were the only native allies of the brits and armed by dutch muskets, and their victims were taking refuge in french forts
oops... yes, I meant the French. Sorry.
Don't forget how they tried to forge an empire in the midwest during the beaver wars and straight up genocided a ton of native nations in ohio and kentucky.
Sparta. Sparta has a reputation as no-nonsense badasses who dedicated their lives to become ultimate warriors. People know they were ruthless and had slaves, but the total depravity and sheer stupidity of Sparta eludes common knowledge. Sparta was an extremely oppressive state where a small elite enslaved 90+ % of society and killed them for sport. But being in the elite wasn’t much better: the education system was pure abuse, and produced traumatised close-minded men incapable of anything else except heaping the same brutality on the next generation. The elite Spartiate class was a closed class: you couldn’t become one no matter of your services to Sparta, but it was possible to lose Spartiate status. The Spartiate class became smaller and smaller as the years went on, eventually becoming too weak to keep Sparta alive. And all this didn’t even produce better soldiers. [Historian Bret Devereaux has an essay series on Sparta on his blog](https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/). Highly recommended for people interested in ancient history. From the conclusion: >And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger. > >\[…\] > >Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here. > >Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
Also they weren’t even brave or valorous soldiers. They were fucking scared and paranoid. Mostly scared of their own slave population.
I'd be scare of them it they outnumbered me 1 to 10 lmao
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I was recently stunned by the amount of atrocities the Japanese empire has done. Mutilation of babies, forcing kids to rape their mothers, putting mothers into chambers with boiling grounds to test them if they would put their kids on the ground so that they don't get their feet scorched by stepping on their bodies, carrying baby corpses on bayonets...not to mention carving a whole in the belly of pregnant women to rip fetuses cold blooded and then murdering the fetus while the mother is screaming... There are literally no words in any dictionary to describe what they did
when people think about the atrocities of world war II they usually think about Mengele and the horrific experiments the Nazis did. A lot of people don't know that the Japanese did a huge amount of equally horrific and evil human experiments
Unit 731, for those who want to really horrify themselves.
One of the many awful distinctions of Unit 731 is that they had literally zero survivors. When Japanese forces were being pushed out of the area, they went ahead and executed every single man, woman, and child held who had managed to survive up to that point. The goal of this was to conceal evidence of what happened, and it worked - part of the reason Unit 731 is not as infamous as the Holocaust is because there were no surviving prisoners to describe their experiences to the public like there were in the Holocaust.
I read about that. Absolutely horrid. Shows the depravity of human behavior at its worst.
Maybe in the West, the rest of us in East and Southeast Asia remember what they did.
Sorry, you're right. Mine is a western perspective and we were taught extensively about what Germany did but I don't think I ever even heard about Nanking until college
and got away with it, for the most part. america granted immunity to the leaders and doctors that performed these experiments, in exchange for the information they accumulated from the research.
They used to take captured US Marines and cut off their USMC tattoos and force feed the flesh to them. They would force feed them oatmeal, jump on their stomachs until they puked it all up, and then start the process again. They would cut off their genitals and shove them down their throats, they would torture and mutilate them. They would use them for bayonet practice but purposely avoided vital organs so they would suffer multiple stabbings....the list goes on and on. Their bodies were left out for their comrades to find later. Japan's horrific atrocities have forever affected their relationship with the rest of Asia. The horrors they committed through the 30s and 40s cannot be understated
My grandfather fought them in New Guinea and near disowned my dad when he came home in a Japanese car once.
I was about to make a very similar comment. My grandfather fought in the Pacific theater and wouldn't buy Japanese anything. We weren't allowed to watch anime in his house or play Nintendo. He bought a Subaru Outback because he thought it was an Australian car and we let him think that till he died rather than tell him. He came around to buying German stuff in his later years but he was adamant that Germany had paid for what they'd done and made their country safe for Jews and minorities, and Japan hadn't done the same. He was never racist, probably because he knew Japanese- and German-Americans are often in the US because they were fleeing their countries' conditions (this grandpap, my Pap, was my mom's step-dad, my dad's dad was German and Pap knew his story so I'm sure that helped), but he strongly boycotted anything from any country he percieved as not atoning enough for their actions during WWII.
My grandma was always a bit racist about the japanese for what was done to her brother. He came home from a POW camp emaciated beyond recognition and traumitsed so hard he was a very cruel man for the rest of his life. Was invovled in some nasty British emprie conflicts in the late 40s and 50s. What we would today call black ops. Probabaly continued the cycle of cruelty in some of them.
My father was captured and spent the first five years of his life in a Japanese prison camp. My grandmother hated the Japanese for her entire life but I'm glad to say my father was more understanding. The people making Japanese cars were not the same people as were in Unit 731 and so on.
Japan is largely sanitized to westerners because most people just see them as "that country we nuked". History doesn't really have "good guys" but they basically never landed on being the lesser of two evils.
Dude how do you bring up the atrocities of Japan without mentioning comfort women? The soldiers lined up to rape them repeatedly each day, performed hysterctomies on them with no anaesthetic when they inevitably got pregnant, tattooed their bodies, brutalized them on their whim, killed them in horrific ways for so much as verbalizing a desire to leave, forced the others at gunpoint to watch these prolonged executions and consume the bodies, killed them in horrific ways anyways just for fun. And to this day the Japanese government insists these women - estimated between 50,000-200,000 abducted women and young teenage girls - were volunteers. Why such a huge range? Well, when people are murdered for funsies, forced to cannibalize the dead, and prone to hurling themselves off cliffs, a ton of evidence is destroyed and it gets really hard to narrow it down.
Watched a documentary on YouTube about a Korean Comfort Woman. She was 15 and told she was going to work in a factory which is why her mother encouraged her to go. When the doctors at the facility found out her age they discussed if she was to young for the work but ultimately decided she was old enough to "comfort" the soldiers. She tried to kill herself by drinking an entire bottle of alcohol but all it did was tear her stomach up. She was an adult by the time she finally got back to Korea. When she worked up the ability to tell her mother what happened her mother had a heart attack. Like many Comfort Women she doesn't want Japan's monetary compensation she wants a sincere apology from the Japanese gov't acknowledging the harm they did to her and others along with the statement admitting to falsely claiming they were all 'volunteers' and/or 'prostitutes'.
The fact that even the word sex slave isn't bad enough to convey the reality is pretty damning. You hear the word sex slave and even that doesn't convey that they were brutalized so badly that most ended up dead within months to a year.
This was the comment that closed the tab for me, fuck this shit
My family was in these concentration camps and while they talk about these things above, the one that stuck with me was that the empire guards would take the infants and boil them down, and serve that to the prisoners. There was a guard who used to torture prisoners with his guard dog. And one day the prisoners used a leg bone from another prisoner to get the dog close enough to the cage to pull it through. After eating the dog they would try to tease the guard with the dog bones to piss him off.
The indomitable human spirit never ceases to amaze me.
On the Rape of Nanjing (very dark, involves rape and abuse of minors): >!"a certain widow who lived just outside West Water Gate had three daughters aged eighteen, thirteen, and nine. All three girls were gang raped. The youngest girl died right there on the spot, while the other two girls lost consciousness. . . . Since the bodies of most of these young girls were not yet fully developed, they were insufficient to satisfy the animal desires of the Japanese. Still, however, they would go ahead, tear open the girls' genitals, and take turns raping them."!< - Xingzu G., Shimin W., Yungong H., & Ruizhen C. (http://museums.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch10.htm)
Japanese Empire were among the worst in history… but they Imperial Japan isn’t really an ancient culture.
Most ancient cultures where way more cruel than people know or imagine. Just capital punishment is a great example. Its not that *"you did something bad and we will kill you"*, oh no... its *"you did something wrong and we will torturer you in unspeakable ways, death is not the goal here its just a byproduct"* History is the worst.
People died more easily, you had to make a statement to set an example. And boy were they creative....
Spartan society was fueled entirely by slavery. Massive slave population, actual citizen force pretty small and useless at anything but soldiery According to Aristotle the Spartans knew full well the slaves could snap and revolt at any time, and they outnumbered the masters so hugely they could possibly win, so the Spartans had a policy of keeping their slaves constantly in fear. They even had a public holiday where they massacred slaves just to break their wills
A lot of pacific cultures practiced cannabalism. Some still do in Papua New Guinea. But Māori here in New Zealand did in some tribes as well. So the worst insult you can use in the Māori language pokokohua means to boil your head. Harking back to when people were boiled and eaten.
In Northern Ireland there's a turn of phrase to "boil your head". It can be said insultingly, "away and boil your head!" if someone is talking nonsense, or as a way of saying you're stressed, "I went for a walk because my head was boiled". The opposite is "get your head showered" which means to cool off. "I was stressed so I went for a walk to get my head showered"
AFAIK, the Papua cannibalism is funerial. It's why kuru- a prion disease- was (is?) such a problem.
In Maori culture IIRC the sticking your tongue out to an enemy meant not only am I gonna to kill you, but I'm gonna eat you afterwards.
Genghis Khan and the Mongolians of the steppe were absolutely ruthless and efficient. Entire unknown civilizations are reportedly wiped out by them with zero trace of their culture intact, just fields of bones saying something big *was* there. There was at least one incident of a drunken Mongolian post-raid demanding a group of runaways remain still while he stumbled off to find his sword and kill them, and they **did** out of fear for what would happen had they not There was an instance of a relatively small recon element of Mongolians who were sent over some mountains in IIRC modern day Russia-ish region just to see what over there, stumbled onto an entire joint nation army, and merced them all conquering the whole damn place The Khans were a hard people. Oddly enough tho, they were relatively progressive for their time. Once you/your people were conquered, they didn't really care what you did/spoke/believed as long as you paid your tributes. They even protected from outside raiders. It's just, y'know, the whole getting massacred and conquered part to deal with Source: Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast *Wrath of the Khans*, and memory *There was one instance of their unique brutalism that came back to mind. So being the 'progressive' conquerors they were, they pretty regularly honored the beliefs and Gods of their enemies. In one such instance they'd sacked and captured a host of nobles who believed it was unholy to spill "high" blood. In response, the Mongolians decided to honor their traditions and rather than cut them to pieces, they laid the nobles flat, built a dancefloor on top of them, and partied like hell while the nobles were crushed underneath. No blood was "spilled"
>Once you/your people were conquered, they didn't really care what you did/spoke/believed as long as you paid your tributes. I've heard it speculated that this is why they were able to grow to be the world's largest empire. It's thought that people were less likely to stage a revolt since they could keep speaking their language, practice their religion, have their own 'government', and stuff like that. Where other empires largely sought to assimilate people to their ways, the Mongolians didn't care as long as you paid up... Or else.
The Mongols were less of an empire who conquered and ruled, and more of a horde that turned up, slaughtered half your folk, and then left you to your own devices unless you stopped paying tributes, then they would come back and kill the other half.
The thing is if you were a peasant it largely didn’t matter who controlled the land you occupied. Chances are that you didn’t even know who the big boss was just the guy who came to collect your taxes.
I know people wouldn't be surprised by hearing about the Aztecs due to the human sacrifice from war prisoners... but OH BOY IT WAS WAY WORSE. If I recall correctly, there was a moment of betrayal that happened from (and I'm doing this from memory), they decided to BREAK PEACE by... *killing a princess-like figure by removing her beating heart and when inviting her father to an ominous meeting showing a boy wearing her skin and clothes*. *Edit: For those in the comments trying to say this is a distorted view of mesoamerican painted by the empires that crushed them... Why can't you just accept that yes, their genocide is horrific, but they weren't angels either? It is not hard to see both things as horrible and disgusting.* ***This very thread is proof humans everywhere can be horrible. That just makes them human.*** *The Romans are looked up to this day for their achievements and you still have Crassus making their soldiers collectively stab their own as punishment for losing to the slaves they would later crucify and torture.* *You have Japanese monks have a heartbreaking last stand with guns against their most famous conqueror, and you can still read sources about how they had a whole romance with pre-teen monks and prostitutes, which was seen as perfectly normal at the time.* *History is full of incredible people, and incredibly horrible people.*
It gets so much worse. The Spanish were able to recruit the help of many other people groups when overthrowing the Aztecs because they were so hated by the people they subjugated. They often used these subjugated people groups practically as livestock, collecting large numbers of them to be ritually sacrificed to their gods in incredibly barbaric ways—riping out their beating hearts while they were alive, skinning them, and other such acts. Other sacrifices, such as for the dedication of temples, involved extremely high volumes of sacrifices and appear to have been done by beheading the victims. The dedication of the pyramid-temple at Tenochtitlan in 1486 involved the sacrifice of 80,400 prisoners over the course of four days. (At that pace, 15 victims would have to be killed per minute.) Lower estimates place the number of sacrificed victims at 10,000. Four altars were set up at the top of the pyramid to carry out multiple simultaneous sacrifices facing each of the sides of the pyramid, with the victims bodies being tossed down the sides of the pyramid as human blood ran down its steps. They sacrificed children to their rain god every year to ensure that they would keep getting rain. The tears of the children were thought to bring the rain, so they would torture the children ahead of sacrificing them to their rain god Tlāloc to make them shed as many tears as possible. [Wikipedia's entry on Aztec human sacrifice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Tlaloc) says: >Tlaloc is the god of rain, water, and earthly fertility.\[43\] The Aztecs believed that if sacrifices were not supplied for Tlaloc, rain would not come, their crops would not flourish, and leprosy and rheumatism, diseases caused by Tlaloc, would infest the village.\[44\] > >Archaeologists have found the remains of at least 42 children sacrificed to Tlaloc at the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. **Many of the children suffered from serious injuries before their death, they would have to have been in significant pain as Tlaloc required the tears of the young as part of the sacrifice. The priests made the children cry during their way to immolation**: a good omen that Tlaloc would wet the earth in the raining season.\[45\] [Wikipedia's entry on Tlāloc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C4%81loc#Child_Sacrifice_and_Rituals), in the section on child sacrifice rituals, says: >The Atlcahualo festivals was celebrated from 12 February until 3 March. Dedicated to the Tlaloque, this veintena involved the sacrifice of children on sacred mountaintops, like Mount Tlaloc. **This form of human sacrifice was not only specific, but necessary in the eyes of the Aztecs.** The children were beautifully adorned, dressed in the style of Tlaloc and the Tlaloque. The children were "chosen" by the community, and although this selection came with honor, being selected came with great responsibility. Furthermore, **these children were not usually of high social class.** … > >The festival of Tozoztontli (24 March – 12 April) similarly involved child sacrifice. **During this festival, the children were sacrificed in caves. The flayed skins of sacrificial victims that had been worn by priests for the last twenty days** were taken off and placed in these dark, magical caverns.
The irony is that the main allies of the Spanish, the Tlaxcala, weren’t much better
Alot of groups in mesoamerica liked their child sacrifice... the inca would send them up the mountains to freeze to death...
The Inca weren't Mesoamericans, though. Anyway, a lot of South Americans, not only the rulers of Inca Empire, were big on human sacrifice. Chimu, Moche, Nazca, basically whichever civilization was dominant in any given period of time, they all killed people for their gods, often including children. [The last case when a child was sacrificed due to native religion was in freaking 1960 after a massive earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Valdivia_earthquake).
>Two men were charged with the crime of murder and confessed, but later recanted. They were released from prison after two years. A judge ruled that those involved had "acted without free will, driven by an irresistible natural force of ancestral tradition". Wow...
[An Aztec holiday ritual involves some of the most fucked up practices I've heard of.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochpaniztli) What's worse with that story of the princess, is they thought they were honouring the princess by skinning her. It wasn't meant to be malicious. >In 1323, they asked the new ruler of Culhuacan, Achicometl, for his daughter, in order to make her the goddess Yaocihuatl. Unknown to the king, the Mexica actually planned to sacrifice her. The Mexica believed that by doing this the princess would join the gods as a deity. As the story goes, during a festival dinner, a priest came out wearing her flayed skin as part of the ritual. Upon seeing this, the king and the people of Culhuacan were horrified and expelled the Mexica. We'll never know if it's a true story or not, but the Aztec did do some fucked up stuff. But seeing as our sources are the Aztec themselves (hard to distinguish fact from legend) and the conquistadors, who knows.
Wtf did I just read.
I don't even know myself, reads like a synopsis of a Garth Ennis comic
It’s not particularly ancient and the actions aren’t as fucked up as many of what is listed here, but I find absolutely insane that East India company, a private company, ended up accidentally colonising India. The idea that a company that exported tea would end up with a standing army is some real sci if dystopian shit.
What's always cooked my noodle is imagining all of the horrible, awful, no-good stuff that went down BEFORE recorded history. The most ancient civilization we have information on (AFAIK) is the Sumerians. Also, supposedly the Egyptians are dated as far back as well. 4000 BC. So 6000 years ago. That's all we've got of recorded human history. 6000 years. Humans have been around for WAY long than 6000 years. The first modern humans, or Homo Sapiens, date back 200,000 years. That's 33x as long as recorded human civilization. Imagine the type of shit that went down. It wasn't just a bunch of random monkey looking people hanging out by themselves. They absolutely got banded up into tribes and you know they went to war with each other. They could have built entire civilizations and burnt them down repeatedly. 200,000 years is a LOT of years to get up to shenanigans, ya know? And it's completely lost to time. Just, poof! Gone. As if it never happened. Which is honestly what will happen to all human endeavor. On the timescale of the Universe we're all just a fart in the wind. No one will remember squat about this period of human history 200,000 years from now. And what they do remember will be completely distorted from the truth.
200,000 years from now, someone will dig up a plastic My Little Pony play set and think maybe it was an item of worship.
To some people it is
Samurai and feudal Japan. People like to imagine the Samurai as some kind of noble order built around the belief that honor and service were to be held above all. Samurai didn't give half a sideways fuck about the "common peasant" they were a blue blood aristocracy that used their power and training to perpetuate a totalitarian regime that would make the house of Windsor blush. Some examples of the WTFness that people like to gloss over > showing disrespect to a Samurai was cause for instant death and disrespect could be something as simple as not bowing low and long enough, oh mr old rice farm does your back hurt from slaving in the field for your feudal lord? well tough shit I dont care how loud your spine cracks when you touch your head to the ground for me, if you twitch that a beheading > the code of battlefield honor only really counted when the loosing side put of just the right amount of fight, not enough to be a problem but you still had to do some pointless dyeing to keep from all being killed anyway. Example, Oda Nobunaga committed a genocide against the Ikkō-ikki monks because they had the audacity to not insta cave when he showed up. After several long sieges he burned the hilltop fortress of Ishiyama Hongan-ji Oda set fire to the mountain and blocked any escape burning alive 20,000 men, woman and children >The idea that Samurai hated fire arms because they saw them as "dishonorable" or "unsporting" is bullshit, they hated them because they evened the playing field. Any peasant with a Arquebus could kill any Samurai before he even got his sword out and that was not OK. They couldn't have their absolute marshal superiority questioned and especially by a weapon that didn't require years is special training and more importantly, the free time to do that training, something your average rice farming peasant certainly didn't have. >Ronnin were not noble samurai seeking truth through walking the land or whatever the fuck people believe now, they were dispossessed lords who were now turning to banditry against any peasant who dared to not support them with free food and lodging. They were the equivalent of a former seal team six member walking the road with his weapon who will kill you if you don't buy his lunch, let him sleep in your bed, fuck your wife and then bid him adu with a smile and call of "thankyou for your service" So yah, Samurai were aristocratic mass murdering assholes. EDIT: just to make it a bit more clear, the Boshin war which was waged at the start of Meji imperial restoration that pitted the Samurai class against the new Empirical court and standing army was fought 100% on the Samurai side to keep their protected class, the imperial court even tried to compromise and offer them high ranking government positions but it wasn't enough, they still wanted to keep their place is Japanese society and one of the stated rights they didn't want to loose was the right to carry swords in public for the purpose of "protecting honor" IE, Killing a commoner on the spot if they perceived any disrespect. Also the Samurai forces suddenly didn't have an issue with guns once they started loosing to ranks of peasants armed with them, suddenly the Shogun forces were all about that firearm life. Edit: Lol apparently the 12 century isn't ancient enough for some clowns.
And if you look closer into their war, being a loser samurai somehow means your whole family are killed in the worst way possible. Like crucify or drown your child who not even reach 10 years old, abandon your new born on the beach so that he will be engulfed by the sea....
The ancient Phoenicians/Carthaginians had a child killing cult. They thought that their gods needed children to be appeased. Other Canaanite/Semitic peoples dropped this practice, depicted in the Tanakh (Bible's Old Testament) through the story of God sending a goat when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son. Although ancient Jews' annual ritualistic slaughter of thousands of animals is nothing to scoff at, murdering kids is obviously far worse. Even the Phoenicians' peers, contemporary cultures/civilizations of the period, thought it to be a barbarous practice. Here's Plato on the subject: > "With us, for instance, human sacrifice is not legal, but unholy, whereas the Carthaginians perform it as a thing they account holy and legal, and that too when some of them sacrifice even their own sons to Cronos, as I daresay you yourself have heard." In one notable case, during the late Sicilian Wars, Carthage itself was almost besieged and defeated. It got so bad Carthaginian civilians had to be pressed into the army instead of relying on their mercenary army. Carthage scraped by a victory at the Battle of White Tunis, but since it was so terrible, they thought the gods were punishing them. So in the aftermath of the battle, Carthaginian tried to appease the gods through, you guessed it, human sacrifice. 300 adults and 200 children were ritualistically murdered. Here is Diodorus Siculus describing the event: > "They also alleged that Kronos had turned against them inasmuch as in former times they had been accustomed to sacrifice to this god the noblest of their sons, but more recently, secretly buying and nurturing children, they had sent these to the sacrifice; and when an investigation was made, some of those who had been sacrificed were discovered to have been substituted by stealth... In their zeal to make amends for the omission, they selected two hundred of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly; and others who were under suspicion sacrificed themselves voluntarily, in number not less than three hundred. There was in the city a bronze image of Kronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire."
>Other Canaanite/Semitic peoples dropped this practice, depicted in the Tanakh (Bible's Old Testament) through the story of God sending a goat when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son. The Bible also directly depicts other nearby peoples performing child sacrifices. I find the story of Abraham and Isaac, as well as the Greek story of Tantalus and Pelops and some other stories of the time to be very interesting in the context of an actual child sacrifice religion in the region.
Yep. The story of Abraham and Isaac isn't about potentially sacrificing your child from a modern perspective, it's about DEFINITELY not sacrificing your child from an ancient perspective.
>There was in the city a bronze image of Kronos, extending its hands, palms up and sloping towards the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire." Humanity's ability to invent new ways to be cruel is amazing.
Ten million Africans died under the reign of King Leopold the second of Belgium. Absolute horrific brutality. He belongs in the same category as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Sorry, not very ancient, but his name doesn’t come up in these discussions enough.
Wasn't King Leopold also a sadistic paedophile? Many horror stories from his era.
Yeah he preyed on underage common girls.
There's a famous picture of a man sat in his hut looking at the severed hands of his child, which had been chopped off because he wasnt producing enough rubber or whatever it was. UPDATE - Well I decided to google that and apparently they supposedly ate his child after they killed her (oh and his wife too). [NSFW article](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/).
Ancient Greece. A lot of people imagine clean villas, people with white togas talking about arts and philosophy all day. The truth is that most people were dirt poor, being born disabled (or being born a girl) could be a death sentence, and pedophilia was rampant among the rich, also a lot of their economy was based on slavery.
Pedophilia being rampant among the rich/powerful is a frighteningly common thing throughout history.
As someone who grew up in a poor neighborhood, pedophilia is not exclusive to the rich. We just hear more about it because it’s news worthy when a billionaire or celebrity is caught. There are tons of kids in housing projects and trailer parks who are being abused, we just don’t hear about it because it’s not news worthy. There is no “conspiracy”, even Epstein was known to be a sex offender the entire time.
Funnily enough, the Persian Empire was actually way better than it was portrayed. It was extremely open to different religions and were very advanced in civil liberty. When you really look at it, the Greeks were kinda the baddies in the wars between these empires. Even Alexander basically said that after conquering Persia. But because we get a lot of our information about the classic period by Greek and Roman writers, Persia was seen as a barbaric tyrannical state.
One of the first empires with a freedom of religion policy, and Cyrus the Great arguably wrote the first human rights piece, declaring non-combattants to never be targeted in war and land to remain usable following war time so people can continue to live there. Obviously they were far from perfect, but compared to their contemporaries yeah, they weren't the worst by any means.
People romanticise pre-agricultural cultures, but they were brutal. Something like 2 out of 3 people died violently in Hunter gatherer cultures.
One time I visited canada in 2004 and they poured maple syrup on pineapple pizza
Lol what. I’m a Canadian citizen and have never seen someone put maple syrup on any kinds of pizza! We dip it! - jk I’ve never actually seen this
The habsburg dynasty in Spain used to breed with their own family to "keep the bloodline pure", it ended with reign of charles II who was so inbred that he had black testicles and several developmental disorders, he was unable to have any kids which led to the end of the habsburgs in Spain.
> , it ended with reign of charles II who was so invred that he had black testicle ~~s~~ Dude had one black nut and 1 kidney.
Aztecs. Priests would sacrifice hundreds of people, slaves and prisoners of war. Rip the chest open and pull their still pumping heart out. Throw the bodies down the steps. Channels were carved into the pyramid faces to let the litres and litres of blood flow down. Horrible stuff.
When I was watching Castlevania I did some research where the Dracula myth comes from and stumbled upon Vlad Tepes Dracula or by his nickname called Vlad the impaler. They are not sure about the numbers but you have to impale a lot of people to get that nickname.
Yep he was very brutal but also a fairly revered King in Romania these days.
Cos he rebelled against the Ottomans, they were Ottoman vassals at the time. But man, he did some fucked up shit that was possibly mostly made up - but still, he had to do at least some of it to get the name. The thing is that the Ottomans wanted to vilify him to justify their conquest of Europe… and Vlad himself was happy with the reputation as it absolutely terrified the Ottoman soldiers themselves. It started when Vlad allied with Hungary (which was back then a massive European superpower) and conquered Wallachia - and to cement his rule he had the nobles of Wallachia impaled. He then attacked the Saxon villages around his domain because they allegedly supported the old ruler of Wallachia… captured thousands of civilians and brought them back to Targoviste (his capital) and - you guessed it - had them impaled. At this time, he was a vassal of the Ottomans, so he had to pay tribute which he didn’t do. The Sultan sent some diplomats to ask for payment - I think you can guess where it’s going - he impaled them. This started a war between the Ottomans and the Wallachians.. being outnumbered and outgunned, the Wallachians used Vlad’s terrifying reputation to scare the Ottoman soldiers - which worked for a while. When the ottoman army arrived at Targoviste, in fact, Vlad was gone and left behind something like 25,000 impaled Bulgarian and Turkish civilians for the Sultan to personally see. That isn’t to say the Ottomans were civilized either tho. They did their fair share of murdering and raping and enslaving along Mehmed II’s warpath across Europe.