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...
Doomed to forever roll a huge boulder up a steep hill, Sisyphus is a figure in Greek mythology who represents an impossible task. As his punishment in the Greek Underworld , each time Sisyphus neared...
A team of archaeologists in England have forensically analyzed the mutilated skull of a young Anglo-Saxon woman revealing that her nose, lips and possibly her scalp had all been sliced off while she...
In medieval societies , it was always quite important to preserve law and order, and to rightfully dispense justice. A just ruler secured himself an obedient populace, and often enough, justice was...
One of the more unusual aspects of the Medieval world was that animals could be put on trial like human beings. Yes, there was such a thing as legal animal trials! While the veracity of many Medieval...
For as long as societies have had to deal with crime, they’ve had to deal out punishment. In some, places, and situations the process was only meant to humiliate the guilty, but most of the following...