Atrocitology - Matthew White

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IS THE TRADITIONAL answer. Some modern historians dismiss ancient atrocity statistics as a matter of course, simply because the supporting evidence (if there ever was any) is now lost. They explain that these statistics come from innumerate and largely illiterate societies lacking the modern ability to count large numbers of people and keep accurate records. Conquerors liked to brag about their exploits, and the vast hordes of the enemy army grew with each retelling. Body counts for individual battles are suspiciously lopsided, with huge piles of enemy dead produced at a cost of a few scratches to the winning side. Civilization before the Enlightenment was rather flexible when it came to historic accuracy, and ancient historians never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

      As historian Catherine Rubincam puts it, “Ancient historians were not like modern historians, especially in their handling of numbers.”1

      Unfortunately the contrast is not always so clear-cut. In later sections of this book, we will see that modern numbers often aren’t much better. For example, it’s quite common to run across estimates of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers killed in the 1991 Gulf War, even though the Americans found only 577 dead bodies and captured only 800 wounded among their 37,000 prisoners.2 For the most recent Iraq War, estimates of the number killed in the five years or so following the 2003 invasion run anywhere from 85,0003 to 1.2 million.4 Compared to that range of guesses, the question of whether 25,000 or 50,000 Romans were killed at Cannae doesn’t look so bad.

      I tend to give ancient records the benefit of the doubt. Our ancestors knew how to count sheep, cattle, and money, so why would they suddenly forget when it came to counting people? Ancient people were literate enough to have left behind extensive graffiti as one of their most common relics. We usually accept the word of ancient historians when they list a chronology of events or itemize a kingdom’s budget, so why are we more skeptical when they count bodies?

      Let’s put this on a scale of 1 to 10. Most modern scholars assume that ancient body counts have a reliability score of 2 (the ancients just plugged in any old number that sounded impressive), compared with modern estimates, which are presumed to have a reliability score of 9 (meticulously counted and cross-referenced against official records). This would easily justify ignoring the numbers in ancient histories.

      On the other hand, I suspect that the reliability of ancient numbers might score closer to 4 (subpar, but estimated by people who at least knew how to keep accounting records and count into the thousands without smoke pouring from their ears). More to the point, I might assign a reliability score of 7 for most modern estimates (a score based on scattered records, and a lot of fudging to fill in the gaps). This makes it a lot harder to draw a line of plausibility between them. If we believe the questionable death tolls from Hiroshima, Stalin’s Russia, or the Korean War, then we shouldn’t get too skeptical about Alexander the Great.

      My rule of thumb is that if at least one modern historian treats an ancient body count as credible, then I won’t dismiss it out of hand. We don’t have to accept every number the ancients throw at us, but doubting an ancient death toll just because it sounds fishy isn’t enough.

      For comparison, consider the Holocaust. Right now, everybody knows the Holocaust happened. If we have any doubts, we can pick up the phone and call someone who was there. At some point, however, there won’t be any eyewitnesses left to ask. We will have to rely on archives as proof. But in 2037, a budget cut will shut down one of the major American archives, which will go into a warehouse and crumble. Then a big war in the Middle East will destroy the Holocaust archives in Israel, and twenty years later a new anti-Semitic dictator in Russia will purge his country’s archives. And let’s not forget the Great Computer Crash of 2022, which will wipe out all of the documents that had been meticulously digitized.

      Eventually, the proof will have eroded so much that we can only take some historian’s word for it that all those people were killed, which is exactly the same problem we face with ancient atrocities. Future skeptics will openly question how Hitler could have possibly killed 6 million Jews with such primitive weapons: Why, that’s more people than lived in any city on the planet at the time, all packed into these half-dozen little camps? Impossible! Six million Jews could have fought back and beaten the Nazis with their bare hands. . . .

      There is a tendency to dismiss a lot of uncomfortable history as hearsay, but when you get down to it, all history is hearsay. We owe it to the victims to not doubt too readily.

XIN DYNASTY

      Death toll: 10 million

      Rank: 14

      Type: dynastic dispute

      Broad dividing line: Han dynasty (legitimate) vs. Wang Mang (usurper) vs. the Red Eyebrows (rebels)

      Time frame: 9–24 CE

      Location: China

      Who usually gets the most blame: Wang Mang

      Another damn: Chinese dynasty collapsing

       Happy Families Are All Alike

      Contrary to what you would expect, traditional monarchies tend to be matriarchal. Let’s say you’re the emperor. Since inheritance passes through the male line, blood relatives of your father are all slotted neatly into the succession, which makes them all rivals. There is no reason for them to look out for your best interests. In palace intrigues, don’t count on help from your younger brother, because he’s next in line for the throne. Your father’s brother is third in line. If anything happens to you, they all move up a step.

      On the other hand, women who have married into the imperial family have a more precarious position. The empress’s only connection to the court might be her relationship to you. If you die and your uncle inherits the throne, then your mother and wife are going to get shoved aside. The best they and their families could hope for is exile; the worst could be a bloody purge. For that reason, the families of your wife or mother are natural allies who will watch your back. The history of empires is replete with powerful dowager empresses, the wives of dead emperors, trying to hold onto power. One way to reduce the influence of your in-laws is to stay in the family and marry sisters (the Egyptian way) or cousins (the European way), but the Chinese had strict laws against incest that required the emperor to marry outside his lineage.

      (You won’t like this next part. It has a confusing profusion of ancient dates and Chinese names,a but you don’t need to stash them into your long-term memory. Just get a feel for the general texture of the events.)

      Shortly after the death of the First Emperor (see “Qin Shi Huang Di”), China fell into civil war from which a new dynasty, the Han, emerged as the sole power. For almost two centuries, a reunified China moved along smoothly under the Han dynasty. When Emperor Yuan (which translates as the “Primary Emperor”) died in 33 BCE, his son, Emperor Cheng (the “Successful Emperor”), came to the throne and ruled quietly for the next twenty-six years. Cheng relied on his mother’s family, the Wangs, to staff his court. For example, command of the army went to the empress’s brother Wang Feng in 33 BCE and passed to Wang Yin (22 BCE), Wang Shang (15 BCE), Wang Gen (12 BCE), and finally to the empress’s nephew Wang Mang in 8 BCE. There was nothing unusual in this, but when Emperor Cheng died without a living son in 7 BCE, the influence of the Wangs abruptly ended.

      The throne then passed to Cheng’s twenty-year-old nephew, his half-brother’s sickly son, the new Emperor Ai (the “Lamentable Emperor”). Cheng had been the son of Yuan’s Empress Wang, but Ai was Yuan’s grandson by way of another woman, his consort, Princess Fu, who now began to elevate her family to high posts in the empire. Emperor Ai, however, was homosexual and died childless in 1 BCE. Ai’s twenty-two-year-old commander of the army

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