Lakeside Village, Jefferson County, Kansas
Assyrians were fairly mean folk, and were the only group that didn’t bother to dispose of bodies in some form or another. When your village has dead bodies strewn across it, and nobody really minds, it shows that you’re pretty casual about death and killing.
i think the WWE. just think about it…one minute, the Rock is best friends with Triple H; the next…
Has someone some link about :
- The mongols killing millions over the course of some months?
2)The Assyrians letting people’s bodies rotting in the street?
There was an ancient culture that existed roughly the same time as ancient Greece, to the north, that was extremely violent. IIRC, they contributed something notable to civilization, like horseback riding…or…
The Scythes?
Sounds about right. What did they invent? Pretty sure it wasn’t the scythe. 
Ah, found 'em. The Scythians. They were amongst the first, if not the first, to domesticate the horse. More info.
I seem to recall Sagan mentioning some type of very brutal African society in “Demons…”, anyone know?
"Societies where if two people mutually decided that the world wasn’t big enough for the both of them, they could do their best to kill one another and no one would think much of it? "
“but rather where there was little notion that hurting or killing people was particularly wrong.”
*This part of the OP is my defense for the US NOT being a candidate. That being said:
I still say the Mongols, remember Attila? He was one of their leaders as well. It was common to take off a head for basically no reason. You were expected to kill or die. I think I’ll go get some cites, but I’m pretty sure about this.
Didn’t China (unsuccessfully) build a wall to keep them out?
I believe the Khans are in some aspects considered the Greatest Emperor’s of all time.
I don’t know to which extent the Huns (Attila) were related to the Mongols, but when people were refering to the Mongols, I assumed they were refering to the the Gengis Khan era, quite a long time after Attila…
Also, I don’t really know to which extent, despite his fame, Attila was actually the savage mass-murderer usually depicted. It seems to me that in Hungary, he’s regarded as kind of a national hero.
The Great Wall was around for more than a millennium before the Mongols and their dynasty. But you are on the right track: when the Ming overtook the Mongols and established their capital at Nanking, they strengthened existing fortifications – including the Great Wall – to stymie any potential Mongol resurgence. The Ming sections of the Wall are the parts of the wall that most people have seen images of.
How about Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge horror? Here’s what the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project’s introduction says:
More information here
I don’t know the relevant population figures, but 21 percent of the whole population might be worse than 30 percent of the males…
I did mention Genghis Khan earlier and after doing a little research in the matter found out that before the Khans brought “civilization” to the Mongols. They were basically a huge tribe of barbaric nomads that had been around for centuries bring devastation and death wherever they went.
Attila “the Hun” used these barbarians in his campaign against his enemies. The barbaric tribes of Mongolia date back to about 450 B.C. whereas the “Empire” is more recent (13th century) and the Great Wall was started in the 3rd cent. B.C.
Whether as a society of nomads or Empire, the Mongols were consistent in the terror they reigned and their history of violence that WAS ACCEPTED AS CORRECT BEHAVIOR.
I can think of smaller groups w/ shorter reigns that were probably worse but the question of public acceptance becomes an issue.
and HTB you’re correct in regards to Ming reinforcing the wall. Even after the Mongols were ousted, the Chinese still feared them.
Damn, I can’t believe I have completely overlooked the Aztecs. They acquired their empire through the outright murder of anyone who was in the way. (Kinda like an ancient form of the Borg, assimilate or die, for any of you Trekfans)
Thousands upon thousands of their own citizens, men, women, children were routinely sacrificed.
These bloodlettings would continue for weeks if not months in order to appease the Gods. This behavior was not only acceptable behavior, it was law. There are accounts of live torture and dismemberment, genocide and cannabalism.
You name it THEY did it.
I guess in the end what goes around comes around…hmm?
But peepthis, so much of Chagnon’s work on the subject has been discredited he can’t be considered a reliable source. He’s often sensationalist. Also, it sounds to me like he threw out that figure off the top of his head to make a point. (Notice he’s one of those people who describes estimates in terms of percentages… “I bear 50 percent of the responsibility…”)
This is not really accurate. First of all, the Mongols proper were a relatively small tribe that in the 12th century roamed an area in what is today the northeastern part of the Republic of Mongolia, plus an adjoining chunk of Chinese Inner Mongolia. The name “Mongol” later came to be applied generically to the larger confederation of tribes that Chingis Khan built in “Mongolia” before embarking on his further conquests, but that confederation in fact included nearly as many Turkic-speaking peoples as Mongol-speakers. Later the name Mongol took on a linguistic meaning, referring to a specific branch of the Altaic linguistic group.
What you might be confusing them with is the first great nomad empire of central Asia, which is traditionally considered to be Turkic-dominated. This Turkic empire ( which later split into two halves - that of the ‘Blue Turks’ and the ‘Celestial Turks’, before disintegrating altogether ) was maybe/probably the prototype that Chinigis aspired to when he began his career.
Nobody knows what the exact ethno-linguistic makeup of the core Huns were. Though the ‘Black Huns’ ( those that entered Europe, as opposed to the apparently Indo-Iranian ‘White Huns’ that exploded into Peria and India at about the same time ) are depicted as being rather ‘Mongoloid’ in feature, linguistically they are a mystery. In the end they were actually a polyglot confederation, including Turks, Mongols, Finno-Ugrians, Indo-Iranians, and others, including, later, Germans, i.e. the Ostrogoths. It is worth noting that the Bulgars, who have often been speculated as being a rump of the old Hunnic empire, were originally a Turkic-speaking group.
At any rate, it is not terribly likely that there is any direct political/tribal connection between Attila’s Huns and Ghingis Khan’s Mongols.
As for the devastation, Attila wrought - Relatively minor, I’d say. He was a piker compared to Chingis Khan and the success of his campaigns had more to do with the weakness of his opponents at the time and his careful avoidance of major engagements and sieges. He mostly launched what were essentially big raids into the countryside, much like the later Magyars, only over a rather smaller period of time. He was likely no more destructive than any of his various Germanic near-contemporaries. Personally he was said to be highly intelligent and a skilled politician.
Well, again, there is a problem of conflating “the Mongols” with steppe nomads in general over this large time period. There was no political continuum that would justify this. Not at the state level and not even at the tribal level. For that matter the difference, culturally, between different ethno-linguistic steppe-dwelling groups like the Mongols, Turks, and Indo-Iranians ( Sarmatians, Scythians, Cimmerians, and what have you ), was trivial. From the domestication of the horse on, they were all highly mobile pastoralists that due to the ecological constraints of their habitat were prone to occasional bouts of overpopulation ( not necessarily numbers, but droughts could collapse the temporary carrying capacity of the steppes ) and periodic eruption into more settled areas. Their mobility and harsh lifestyle ( which pretty much made every able-bodied male a de facto soldier in extremis ) made them a perennial threat to these more settled societies and enabled “extortion-economies” which perpetuated the cycle of conflict.
So I wouldn’t say the Mongols were intrinsically any more violent than any of the other steppe groups, like the Scythians, or indeed any people from a marginal region.
However the Chingisid Mongols, as a state, did wreck an awful lot of havoc. Though I do question the high body counts of “millions” in a few months. Millions period over generations, as much through mismanagement as warfare ( at least in China ), yes. But I suspect the estimate of millions in a few months by direct slaughter is a medieval exaggeration ( at a guess, I think this might be based on the extremely destructive and rapid Khurasan campaign, which some think did indeed permanently depress demography in that region, especially through destruction of qanat sytems or underground canals ).
Now the Aztecs did take ritual religious slaughter to a whole new level, especially under Ahuitzotl. There is a question as to how exaggerated this was in time ( earlier Aztec ritual killings were rather less large-scale ), because of this sudden acceleration. But at least at the time of the Spanish landing, it was pretty significant.
Ultimately though, I do think this is an unanswerable question, as I think that you can find many, many cultures that glorified combat and war. Ancient Sparta, for example. Or were/are internally violent due to societal stress ( like modern Colombia or Burma ). Parsing out jst who is/was most violent brings up too many difficult and unequal comparisions. MHO.
- Tamerlane
Been discredited by whom, Tierney & his followers? Chagnon’s work has certainly not been unequivocally invalidated by anthropologists, just questioned. Some simple Google searches will bring up the responses to Tierney’s claims, and not just from Chagnon. I’m inclined to agree with Tierney’s assertions about Chagnon bringing measles to the Yanomamo, but am not nearly as persuaded by his assertion that Chagnon provoked the violence he documented.
The 30% statistic is quite a famous one from his scholarly work, and not one Chagnon was making up on the spot for the interview. I just cited the interview because I cannot remember which publication it originally appeared in.
The pygmies of Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~reffland/anthropology/learning/lifeways/diasporas/exhaustion.html
“In the mid-1800s, when a British ship visited Little Andaman Island and sent a launch ashore, the native Onge captured some of the sailors, cut off their arms and legs, and then burned the still-living trunks on the beach before the eyes of those who had managed to escape back to the ship.”
Whoops, should have double-checked my memory before posting - ‘Blue’ and 'Celestial Turks were synonyms for the same unified state - the Kok-Turuk Kaganate. The later split was into the ‘Western’ ( probably synonomous with the Oghuz, who played a momentous role in the later history of Islam ) and ‘Eastern’ Turks ( likely synonomous with the Uighur, who would play an important cultural role in the shaping of the Mongol empire ).
Wow, how embarassing - good thing I caught that before the inevitable avalanche of posters piled on me for making such an egregious error :D.
- Tamerlane
condones casual murder amongst it’s citizens…?