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We were absolutely brutal

Reading about the ancient world gives some incredible perspective into what humans were once like. The difference between the behavior now and the behavior then is huge, and yet, incredibly the underlying human psychology[1] remains pretty much the same. Biologically, we haven't changed, but socially, we've changed a ton.

I was reading about Ashurbaipal[2] and came across this account of his destruction of Elam, the historic enemy of Assyria:

Like the onset of a terrible hurricane I overwhelmed Elam in its entirety. I cut off the head of Teumann, their king, – the haughty one, who plotted evil. Countless of his warriors I slew. Alive, with my hands, I seized his fighters. With their corpses I filled the plain about Susa as with baltu and ashagu. Their blood I let run down the Ulai; its water I dyed red like wool.

There's a whole book full of Assyrian records[3] that all pretty much read like this. It's incredible stuff.

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This is us, we do this. We're the same creatures[4] that devastated and slaughtered, made rivers run red with blood. We seem to often like to lie to ourselves, to pretend we're something that we're not. That these ancient people were different, were some kind of savages. I don't think it's so easy. The same drive that once caused Ashurbanipal to lop off heads and flay people alive still exists, just channeled to a different sort of action.

What is that action, I wonder?

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Last updated Wed Mar 16 2022 in Berkeley, CA

Links

1: /thought/psychology.gmi

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashurbanipal

3: https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/ancient_records_assyria2.pdf

4: /thought/i-might-be-evil.gmi

Backlinks

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