Worst Punishments in Human History

you're probably familiar with a lot of different punishments from detention to jail time you might have even heard about barbaric historical sentences such as hangings burnings and stonings but as dreadful as they were humans throughout history have come up with even more twisted and terrible ways to punish alleged wrongdoers from burning bulls to bug buffets these are some of the worst punishments in human history sacking of rome have you ever been in a cramped spot with someone you don't like maybe shared an elevator with that one annoying co-worker well it could always be worse that

annoying co-worker could also be an angry venomous snake the ancient roman point of courier or punishment of the sack involved placing the victim into a large canvas sack at this point a dog cat monkey rooster and snake would then also be tossed into the sack before the sack itself was thrown into a river the idea behind buoyance was that as the sax slowly filled with water the frightened and aggressive animals inside would tear each other and the unfortunate victim stuck in the middle apart the exact animals thrown into the sack varied from punishment to punishment

after all why waste a perfectly good monkey when you could just use an extra rooster this nasty punishment was most often meted out to those accused of parasite which is the crime of slaying one of your parents i'm not exactly sure why slaying your parents would net you a timeout in the danger sack doesn't seem like an especially ironic or fitting punishment maybe it's funnier if you speak latin either way this barbaric punishment fell out of style in the 3rd century ce in rome only to be reinstated by emperor justinian 200 years later where it

remained in use for another 400 years definitely redefines the meaning of getting the sack skafing reviews if you were told you were going to be experiencing the boats in ancient persia you might expect a pleasant trip lounging along the corona river lazily eating dates in reality you'd be in for one of the most disgusting experiences imaginable devised in the 5th century bce scafism also known as the boats was a punishment that started off sweet literally the victim was fed a large amount of sweet honey and milk or cream and things got considerably less comfortable after

that if the victim was lucky they would be tied up inside a boat if they weren't they'd be placed inside a boat before another upturned boat was placed on top of them so that their arms legs and head were sticking out the boats were then pushed into a lake or swamp and this is where things get nasty the sickly mixture of milk and honey would eventually cause the victim to vomit or relieve their bowels in addition to being gross and causing dehydration the sugary contents of the victim's excretions would also attract insects incredibly quickly over

the next few days the victim would slowly starve while their body was consumed inside the boat by flies maggots and any other awful swamp creatures you can imagine if you'd done something really bad your boat would be pulled back ashore so you could be force-fed more milk and honey to drag out this process even longer plutarch a greek essayist recorded an instance where a persian soldier killed a nobleman and survived 17 days of scafism before succumbing to his punishment man and i thought an hour of detention after school was a cruel sentence rats the throughout

human history wherever people have gathered in large numbers rats have followed living in our homes rent-free and eating our delicious trash it's only fair we put them to work in modern times rats are mostly employed as test subjects in scientific research but if we jump back a few hundred years these pernicious pests were proliferators of pain in the 17th century the dutch would place a rat on a prisoner's abdomen before securing a pot or half cage over the rat the pot would then be heated and the rat eager to escape would begin to burrow through

the prisoner's skin of course this isn't the only way we humans have utilized rats to hurt each other of all the awful places you could end up in medieval england the tower of london had to be the worst the infamously gruesome prison made use of a special rat dungeon which i'm sorry to say wasn't for imprisoning criminal rats the waters of the nearby river thames would often rise in the rain and sweep the rats of the city into the dungeon where they would scare and even nibble on the chained up prisoners around the same time

in germany rats were being starved and then placed in a cage which would then be fastened around the victim's neck i'm sure you can imagine what the cramped hungry rats did next yikes or should i say rats well between being eaten alive by rats and being eaten alive by insects which do you think is the worst punishment for the rats hit the subscribe button and for the insects hit that like button all done great now what horror have we got next what a drip let's take a break from physical harm for a moment to talk

about psychological torture and no i don't mean watching a modern simpsons episode chinese water torture is a form of punishment and interrogation that involves restraining someone's arms and legs before placing a bucket full of water above their head the bucket has a small pinprick sized hole in the bottom that drips water onto the victim at regular intervals the victim is usually positioned so the drops hit them on the forehead which along with your fingertips is one of the most sensitive areas of the body while this may not sound so bad at first it could last

for weeks as the process goes on it becomes more and more maddening because the victim is unable to think or concentrate on anything other than the constant dripping thoughts become incoherent other sensations fade away until all that's left is the hammering feeling of in some instances the victim would be told the water contained poison that would deteriorate their mind over time compounding feelings of anxiety and paranoia in all likelihood the chinese are getting undeserved flack as the pioneers of this punishment as its use was first documented in italy in the late 15th century hippolytus that

must sell wrote that the punishment was inspired by the way natural water would slowly erode stones over time it's thought the word chinese was added simply to make it seem exotic and mysterious like the yield equivalent of smart water since then it's been utilized all over the world from the american civil war to spanish inquisitors in the 16th century who also experimented with forced drinking as punishment well at least they didn't have access to sparkling water white light our next punishment is known as white torture or sometimes white terror to understand white terror however we

first need to understand solitary confinement solitary confinement is a form of punishment frequently used against prisoners today that involves placing them in a small cell devoid of human contact or activities in the united states solitary confinement is used to reprimand behavior as major as starting fights but also as minor as having extra rolls of toilet paper in your cell most solitary cells are just six by nine feet in size smaller than a standard car keep in mind this imprisonment can last for days weeks or months resulting in extreme distress and psychological damage because humans are

naturally social animals our brains often invent stimuli when they're deprived of it extended solitary confinement is known to lead to hallucinations paranoia depression nightmares disassociation from your body and even physical pain and nausea one inmate in solitary for 23 days once said one night i heard someone screaming far away then i realized it was me though it's hard to imagine there's actually an even more extreme version of solitary confinement white terror the victim is placed inside a stark bright white room everything in the room is white and non-reflective from the bed to the toilet and

even the victim's clothes bright lights are positioned in such a way as to eliminate as many shadows as possible and make the victim feel as though they are trapped in a white void even meal time is no escape from the encompassing whiteness as they are fed white rice from white bowls which is silently slid through a hatch in the white door these meals occur at random times so the victim is unable to gauge how much time has passed since their imprisonment in the white room it's hard to tell if it's been days or weeks since

your last conversation oh and silence is another awful part of this punishment the only way prisoners can communicate with guards is to slip a white sheet of paper under the door but even then the guards are instructed to wear cushioned shoes that don't produce any noise when walking about the effects of the white room are the complete overwhelming deprivation of anything except one's own mind which quickly deteriorates just 15 minutes in the white room is said to lead to feelings of paranoia and anhedonia the inability to feel happiness white torture was supposedly invented by the

cia in the 1970s for utilization against the viet cong iran still uses white torture today and one detainee put it thusly after three days i wanted words anything even swearing even interrogation considering i can't make it five minutes without looking at my phone i hate to think how quickly i'd crack severe feather warning if you've ever seen an old cartoon you may be familiar with the practice of tarring and feathering this old-timey punishment involves slathering the victim in hot tar before dumping a bag of feathers over them making them look like a giant chicken the

obscure punishment was first used in the 12th century by sea captains as a way of punishing thieves in the english navy centuries later in the 1760s it was rediscovered by colonial americans and became a favorite form of mob justice usually employed against folks that had simply offended the sensibilities of a community unlike other punishments discussed today tarring and feathering wasn't meant to end the victim's life so much as hurt and humiliate them pine tar was often used as it has a relatively low melting point of around 130 degrees fahrenheit this means the tar becomes goopy

and sticky long before it becomes lethally hot but would also still be hot enough to cause burns and blisters these blisters did hold the risk of becoming infected and causing worse problems down the line but also served as a visual indicator you'd been punished long after you defeated yourself tarring and feathering was often carried out in a public form before the victim was paraded through the streets where they could be mocked by onlookers disempowerment humiliation and pain were the ultimate goals of this punishment though the practice fell out of fashion as official state mandated punishment

it turns out that it's pretty hard to put a lid on mob justice in america there are reports of men who refuse to serve in the first world war being tired and feathered in the streets the barbaric punishment even popped up as recently as 2007 in ireland where someone dealing illicit substances was tied to a lamppost before being tarred and feathered by vigilantes i better not get on their bad side i never look good in feather jackets an elephant never forgives you have to feel bad for elephants all they really want to do is chill

out by the watering hole with their buds but because they're so big and weird looking humans have used them for everything from circus performances to weapons of war and even for executions the most infamous and well-known employment of elephant executioners comes from medieval india and was known as gongorao if you consider that an asian elephant typically weighs around eight thousand eight hundred pounds as much as nine grand pianos it doesn't take long to figure out how they could be used to end a life gungo rao involved the victim placing their head on a wooden stake

as an elephant was slowly marched towards them before squishing the life out of them with their enormous feet dunga rao was not employed conservatively and was the punishment of choice for everything from thievery to tax evasion this is perhaps why it captured the imaginations of medieval travelers to india though elephantine executions actually dated back to the classical era they were employed in ancient rome carthage and macedon and one instance after the death of alexander the great macedonian regent pardissus sentenced dozens of insurrectionists to a hefty trampoline and while the straightforward smooshing was devastatingly effective there

have been other more creative forms of pachyderm punishments around the globe in thailand elephants would fling victims around like ragdolls with their powerful trunks whereas in sri lanka they'd be gored with their menacing tusks the moroccan traveler ibn patuto wrote of an incident of ganga rao in which the elephants were wearing sharp instruments on their feet and tusks to aid in the execution which really seems like overkill to me literally a load of steaming bull if you've ever had to use public transportation on a hot day you might have some idea what this next punishment

is like king fellaris ruled over what is now sicily between 554 and 570 bce and was known for his cruel and potentially even cannibalistic tendencies the story goes that he was keen to create a new nauseating torture device to make it he commissioned the one guy in town more messed up than him an inventor named paralos who created the brazen bull the device was a bronze statue of a bull with a hollow and large interior the victim was to be placed inside the dark cramped statue before a fire was lit underneath it as the statue

slowly heated up the victim would be cooked alive inside now if that wasn't enough to tip you off that perilous was a serious sadist consider the fact that the bull's nostrils were connected to the statue's interior this meant as the victim struggled their screams would reverberate out of the statue mimicking the cries of a raging bull [Music] even fellaris the infamously cruel tyrant king took one look at the brazen bull and said uh this is a little messed up dude as punishment for well basically doing what he was asked polaris had perilous entombed inside his

own creation and a fire was lit underneath after getting a few good chuckles in fellars let perlos out apparently assuring him it was all just a harmless joke changing his mind yet again volaris then had perilous tossed off a cliff talk about indecisive oh and according to some accounts fellaris was later burned alive in the very brazen bull he commissioned during an uprising so let this be a lesson to everyone watching if you invent a gruesome method of execution don't be surprised when it's turned against you i'm fuming things are about to get steamy because

it's time to talk about being boiled alive that's right ever since people figured out they could boil a carrot to make it softer awful tyrants have been doing the same to people the earliest records of lethal boiling came from emperor nero in ancient rome with the victims primarily being christians in 1531 king henry viii of england passed an act decreeing poisoning a crime punishable by boiling this was probably because henry had an apparent fear of poisoning and look at the dude he wasn't about to stop eating shortly after henry died edward vi outlawed boiling recognizing

the middle ages were coming to an end and it was time to rein in the nasty stuff but how nasty was it well you could call it a death that retreats inwards starting in your extremities this is because your arms and legs are the most exposed parts of your body and contain lots of nerve endings so pain begins in your fingers and toes and shoots inwards after this your skin muscle and fat begin to soften and liquify from the heat fusing to your clothes this heat will then boil your organs from the inside as well

as your flesh from the outside you'll also likely go blind fairly quickly so you'll be thrashing around in the dark if you're dumped into water that's already bubbling your brain can boil inside your head fast which is strangely merciful if you're placed into a liquid that's slowly heated up your body will try to adjust to the temperature change which really drags things out making everything slower and more agonizing if your executioners know what they're doing this can take minutes or even hours and you'll be awake for most of it maybe now you'll feel a little

more sympathy for those lobsters in the grocery store tanks thankfully this punishment isn't employed anywhere in the world today though people still accidentally boiled to death today in hot springs and sewer accidents just in case you thought it was a fate of the past ride it out here's a fact to soothe your nerves as it turns out many of the scariest looking torture devices from the middle ages are fake shady museums and con men began creating nasty contraptions in the 18th century which quickly captured the public's imagination this means famously nightmarish devices like the iron

maiden and the pair of anguish are just props rather than actual torture implements nerve soothe good because this next one is awful and real introducing the wooden horse also known as the dutch horse or spanish donkey if the multinational names didn't tip you off the wooden horse was a punishment device popular across medieval europe the contraption consists of a long square-shaped wooden beam held up by several legs for support one of the corners of the beam would be positioned skywards and the unlucky victim would be forced to straddle the beam the corners would uncomfortably dig

into the victim's crotch as well as the sides of their legs on some occasions weights were applied to the victim to drag them down more the corners of the wooden beam could be quite sharp but it didn't matter too much if they weren't because victims would have to ride the horse for hours or even days at a time though the wooden horse wasn't lethal it was extremely painful and restricted blood flow through the legs which could [ __ ] the victim to add insult to injury the wooden horse would sometimes have a mock head and

tail at either end and be long enough to support multiple people the judas cradle was a more personal version of the device and featured a single large spike positioned on the seat of a chair talk about a pain in the air grotesque and uncivilized as it was the wooden horse was still in use during the american war of independence george washington himself claimed it was an excellent way to extract information from prisoners well i guess it's one way to get someone off their high horse pain in the head our next story concerns the practice of

iconoclasm and no that isn't a metal band made up of your desktop icons iconoclasm is the destruction of religious idols techs and monuments and around the year 720 it swept across the byzantine empire the belief was that the biblical second commandment expressly forbids the worship of images and idols this ideology continues in some ways today in judaism and islam the two other abrahamic faiths at the time however not every god-fearing christian was on board with iconoclasm two such anti-iconoclasts were brothers theophonics and theodore and they weren't afraid to preach they were so bold they even

sought an audience with emperor leo v sometime in the 810's asking him to kindly butt out of ecclesiastical matters he took that surprisingly well for an evangelical emperor sentencing the brothers into exile on a small island when leo was assassinated in 820 and the brothers regained their freedom it wasn't long before they ended up in front of the new emperor theophilus who was decidedly less forgiving than old leo theophilus subjected the brothers to two days of torture in which a 12-line poem insulting them was carved into their heads with hot needles a rough translation of

the poem is on screen now but man at school i was bullied for having a five head how big must have theirs been to fit all this neither brother accepted iconoclasm with theodore eventually dying in prison the ofanis however was only exiled and became a bishop when icon veneration was eventually restored for their efforts both brothers were canonized as saints theophaneus and theodore the branded funny that their images are now celebrated in religious art all these centuries later how would they feel about it well i think the answer would be written all over their faces

total blackout if you're like me there's a good chance you've tried to get in shape only to head back to the sofa after a single squad this exercise already sucks could you imagine doing it for hours in complete darkness that's the idea behind the blackout box this punishment and interrogation method was utilized by the cia during the war on terror while former cia executive buzzy crongart and even president obama have admitted that the usa commits torture some still prefer the term enhanced interrogation the blackout box is a small box just barely big enough to fit

a crouching human being inside remember how awful and dehumanizing solitary confinement sounded well the blackout box is the most extreme version imaginable locking a person into the darkest tightest space possible to cause stress the high-pitched sounds of crying children are sometimes played inside the box in 2015 a journalist from the bbc underwent a black outbox demonstration when after less than 15 minutes demanded to be let out less fortunate folks have been forced inside boxes less than 1.75 feet wide two and a half feet deep and two and a half feet tall which is smaller than

some dog crates and is hauntingly depicted by their drawings some have spent up to 250 hours in this box and that's over 10 days in one particularly vile instance the captors discovered the victim had a fear of insects and so they poured live cockroaches into the blackout box while the victim was inside leaving them to crawl over their body for hours never thought i'd say this but suddenly being boiled alive doesn't sound all that bad well there they were a few of the most spine chilling punishments humanity has ever cooked up which did you think

was the worst and would you be keen to learn about even more in a part two let me know down in the comments below and thanks for watching you