oh, the inhumanity
A macabre encyclopedia of humanity’s most creative cruelties
Strangulation
Strangulation is the oldest execution method because it requires nothing but permission and pressure. Across empires and centuries, it served as a quiet sentence, designed to erase a life without spectacle, blood, or debate.
Civilians Burned in Sanctuary
The deliberate burning of civilians inside sacred spaces, where churches, temples, and sanctuaries were weaponized to turn refuge into execution. Across eras and empires, it reveals how fire was used not only to kill bodies, but to shatter the idea that any place could stand outside the reach of power.
Garroting
They called it mercy, but it sounded like a screw tightening in the dark. The condemned sat in a plain wooden chair, an iron collar closing around the throat, and with each slow turn the world narrowed to pressure, silence, and the tidy brutality empires preferred to call civilization.
Public Flogging
Public flogging was never meant to kill. It was designed to instruct — a measured violence calibrated for survival, spectacle, and memory. Each counted lash turned the human body into a public document, teaching obedience not through death, but through endurance witnessed by all.
Public Hanging
They called it justice. It looked like carpentry elevated into theology. The rope creaked, the crowd murmured, and the scaffold waited with the patience of a tool that knew its work. In every civilization that raised a beam and tied a knot, hanging became less a method than a message — a lesson written on a human body at the highest point in town.
Mutilation & Amputation
Across empires and eras, mutilation turned the human body into a ledger of authority — a hand for defiance, an ear for disobedience, a tongue for truth spoken at the wrong moment. Justice claimed the blade was impartial; history shows otherwise.
Burning at the Stake
They called it purification, but the stake was really a sermon written in smoke.
impalement
Man has raised monuments to his gods, his kings, and his victims — impalement was all three at once.
The snake pit
When justice went medieval, they didn’t drop the mic — they dropped you into a pit of snakes.
Nailing Skulls to Trees
They turned the forest into a courtroom, and the trees kept the verdicts nailed to their trunks.