oh, the inhumanity
A macabre encyclopedia of humanity’s most creative cruelties
Scaphism
Scaphism, known as “the boats,” was an ancient Persian execution method that relied on confinement, exposure, and time rather than direct violence. By sealing a victim between two boats and letting nature complete the sentence, it turned the environment itself into the executioner.
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.
Tonte Publique
In the aftermath of liberation, France found a punishment that required no courts and spilled no blood: the public shearing of women accused of collaboration. Tonte publique stripped identity rather than life, proving that a society can erase a person without ever laying claim to justice.
Public Shaming Rituals
Public shaming rituals punished without killing, turning exposure itself into the sentence. By stripping symbols of dignity in front of witnesses, societies learned that humiliation could enforce order long after the crowd dispersed.
Rape as Governance
States have long ruled not only through laws and armies, but by authorizing violation as a tool of control, rewriting power directly onto private life. This entry traces how sanctioned abuse became governance by other means, leaving scars on societies long after the uniforms and decrees disappeared.
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.