Well then.
‘Alexander and the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians(Spartans), set up these spoils from the barbarians dwelling in Asia.’
Have to respect a pretty good diss, the 300 suits of armor is an obvious reference to Thermopylae
my next band name
And, well, everyone else. I have a very difficult time taking the number of people kill during or after an assault. Many inscriptions refer to the complete destruction of a city, where the city is back in business apparently untouched a few years later.
Surpri-ise!
It literally incentivizes only working hard enough to not be punished and effort and investment of owners is into more slaves instead of improving productivity. Slavery is an economic trap of local maxima to the slaveholder. It is no coincidence that late abolishers are worse off than their neighbors who abolished earlier.
Not bothering with slavery is what helped acquire technology to massively beat out the short term. In spite of the emphasis on lower per unit cost slavery also is terrible in an industrial context, especially in a war one. The gulags weren't closed from kindness but because they looked at the infastructure produced and saw how awful it was. Using it for war materiale you may as well not bother with any locks or posted guards and outright invite in any foreign spies and saboteurs you find because you have them all literally incentivized to work just good enough to make it appear initially good to inspection and then fail in practice.
In all fairness to slavery it was the alternative to genocide historically. Yes, that previous sentence is horrifying on many levels. Genocide was the prior status quo and fights were over food supplies in the first place meaning displacement to a hostile undesirable wilderness or outright genocide were the common outcome for losers and being taken as a mate was "being lucky".
Food was too expensive to keep non-working captives for anything less than a suitably huge ransom. Human sacrifice had a habit of appearing and then falling out of favor once slavery was instituted (seen well in early Chinese tombs). The implications of human tendencies towards rationalization to justify what they want are clear and disturbing.
uh, maybe we just disrupted the market for slaves, so it isn’t so profitable it justifies the risk/backlash anymore (for all but a tiny subset anyway)? Which is good.
Mass murder still seems to be on the menu though, unfortunately.
Pretty much every culture around the world in ancient times had some sort of moral explanation for why infanticide was allowed. Now that extra mouths to feed aren't an imminent threat of everybody dying, the practice is considered immoral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
we aren't genetically different from those people, we just happen to live in a time where we don't have to make as many tough choices
I don't think anyone is claiming a genetic evolution. It has been a memetic evolution.
You see this with the Romans, too: they tell a city to surrender, it doesn't, the Romans conquer it and practice unspeakable brutality on whomever's left.
So what's happening? They have very limited resources, you forced us to expend them, maybe lose some of our own soldiers, and waste a valuable campaigning season - ok, now you pay the price, and let this be a warning to the next city: if we tell you to surrender, you'd better surrender.
What if the city does surrender? Are those people killed or sold into slavery anyway? I don't think historians bother recording those episodes.
Typically, no. The attacker may leave the city entirely intact, or may place their own proxy government. They may take the elites of the city as prisoners, either as punishment or as insurance.
Its very questionable if he was all that nice to the Medians and Assyrian cities.
'Good guys are the ones who worship the right god(s) and therefore we get to kill the bad people next door', or 'Good guys are guys who serve the King/Emperor and anything that advances his glory is good', 'Good guys are cultured people and everyone else is a barbarian' etc.
You’d previously get word of mouth of what was happening (with lots of us vs them, dehumanizing, etc.). Now you’d get to see it ‘in person’ in 4K @ 60fps on YouTube.
It’s easier to say (and think) ‘yeah, those bastards deserved it’ when you aren’t seeing a very human person have it done to them up close.
Which is a good thing.
I think it comes down to economics.
Ancient cities were primarily administrative and trading centers for the surrounding territory. Most of the wealth was coming from outside of the cities, it was just collected in the cities. You could kill off most of the people in the city and still keep most of the value because you still have the infrastructure that lets you control the surrounding territory.
By the time you get to the modern era, cities are producing a lot of value of their own. If you kill off the people, you've gotten rid of the whole reason why you want to capture the city.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
At least half of the history in the wiki describes major civilizations and religions which absolutely banned the practice. Ancient Egypt, all Abrahamic religions, ancient China... Apparently many people did thought infanticide was immoral and did ban it.
While yes, there remains some underground slavery, and it is indeed terrible.
The world uniting and deciding to end this terrible practice is a hugely positive step for our species.