After a night of drinking, few things are worse than a heinous hangover. Or so I thought! For during the early modern era, heavy drinkers were faced with a far worse punishment. Those guilty of...
There was no end to medieval creativity when it came to torture , punishment and humiliation! The ‘scold’s bridle’ or ‘mask of shame’ was a concept developed in medieval Europe to punish people,...
Capital punishment (death by execution) has been a part of human society since time immemorial. Even though it is a practice as old as human civilization, perhaps the most surprising thing about...
The Roman army was one of the fiercest armies ever assembled. It was disciplined, well trained, and well equipped. This combination meant the Roman army played a crucial role in Rome’s expansion from...
In many corners of the globe, aristocrats and nobles, kings and young princes, were all deemed to be ‘ untouchable ’ and protected by divine right . To lay one’s hand on a nobleman or noble child was...
Xerxes I, also known as Xerxes the Great, was a 5th century Achaemenid king of the Persian empire. He is best known for leading the massive invasion of Greece, marked by the battles of Thermopylae,...
Researchers in China believe a skeleton found in a tomb in the northwest of the country is the earliest known example of foot amputation as punishment for a crime, reports the South China Morning...
Athens is perhaps most famous for being the birthplace of democracy. One of the cornerstones for the establishment of Athenian democracy was the introduction of a written law code that could only be...
The curious English have a predilection for heaping abuse upon the corpses of the unfortunate dead, including a cruel and unusual punishment the bodies of executed murderers were subject to in the...
The Code of Ur-Nammu is the oldest surviving law code. This text was written on clay tablets in the Sumerian language and is reckoned to have been produced towards the end of the 3rd millennium BC...
Slavery was a large part of the Roman Empire. Military expansion brought captives, to compliment the material wealth taken back to Rome. And there is strong evidence that these slaves were not always...
Archaeologists have presented gory visual evidence that problematic people were fed to lions in Roman Britain. Excavations at a Roman house in Leicester, England in 2017 unearthed a dirt-caked bronze...
Near the city of Gaza, 3,000 years ago, laid a city unlike any other in the world. The Greeks called it Rhinocolura, named for strange faces of the people who lived there – because every person there...
Immurement is a practice whereby a person is enclosed within a confined space with no exits. Normally, a person who is immured is left in that space till he/she dies, either of dehydration or...
As the world’s powers perpetually rise and fall, exile and banishment have forever been ubiquitous elements of human history. Exile and ostracism have afflicted individuals and nations, inspiring...
Public order in ancient Rome was a priority for the elite, who contrived a range of gruesome punishments for purportedly serious crimes deserving the death penalty. As a result, a day of fun and...