Atrocitology - Matthew White

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mostly on Jerusalem, and much of Palestine remained unravaged. Peace and prosperity gradually returned.1 Then the Romans tried to assimilate the province into the larger Mediterranean cultural melting pot. Around 132, Emperor Hadrian banned genital mutilation throughout the empire, which sounds like an excellent idea until we remember that Judaism requires circumcision. Hadrian quickly revised his order to make an exception for Jews. Unfortunately, Hadrian also chose this moment to start rebuilding Jerusalem as a modern Roman city with a temple of Jupiter where the temple of Yahweh had stood.

      The Jews would not accept any of this, and they rose up under Simon ben Kosiba, who gained the messianic nickname Bar Kokhba, “Son of the Star.”2 The rebels were strongest in the countryside, where they built fortified strongholds interlaced with hidden access tunnels. The Romans sent three legions to put down the rebellion. It was a hard campaign, and one of the legions disappears from the history books after this, probably wiped out by the rebels. The war is said to have destroyed fifty strongholds and 985 villages. It was so destructive that we still don’t have the whole story or too many relics, just a few caves discovered in the cliffs near the Dead Sea. These caves housed the last of the rebels, and archaeologists named them after their most distinctive contents: the Cave of Scrolls, the Cave of Arrows, the Cave of Letters (including some written by Bar Kokhba), and the Cave of Horrors (forty skeletons, entire families dead of starvation), among others.

      When the fighting was over, most of the Jews in Palestine were killed, exiled, or enslaved, and this time the Romans made certain there would not be a next time. The Romans depopulated much of the territory and restocked it with more cooperative ethnicities. The Jews were exiled from Palestine, and the Diaspora, the scattering of Jews across the globe, began.

       Death Toll

      Ancient historians claim that as many as 2 million Jews were killed in these and other revolts. The contemporary Jewish historian Josephus reported that 1,197,000 people were killed during the siege of Jerusalem in the first revolt, although Tacitus estimated a death toll of half that: 600,000.3 Cassius Dio4 reports that a total of 580,000 Jews were killed in battle during the second revolt. Ancient historians report the death toll for other rebellions by Jewish minorities in Cyrene and Cyprus (not included here) as 220,000 and 240,000.5 These unbelievable claims are usually held up as the perfect example of why not to trust the numbers in ancient histories.

      Realistically, maybe one-fifth to one-half of the inhabitants of Palestine died in each of the revolts, but that’s still not a complete answer because no one knows how many people lived there to begin with. Estimates of the pre-revolt population of Palestine run anywhere from 0.5 million to 6 million. Religious historians tend to favor the high numbers, which are based on written sources like the works of Josephus; archaeologists favor the low numbers, which are based on land use and population densities.6 In any case, a reasonable estimate would be something like 350,000 deaths all told, which would be around one-third if the original population was 1 million, or one-half if it was 700,000, or one-fourth if it was 1.4 million. No matter what anyone says, it’s unlikely that the ancient population of the area came anywhere close to 2 million, which was the number of inhabitants at the time of independence in 1948.

THE THREE KINGDOMS OF CHINA

      Death toll: 34 million missing

      Rank: 25

      Type: failed state

      Broad dividing line and major state participants: Wu vs. Wei vs. Shu

      Time frame: 189 –280 CE

      Location: China

      Other state participants: Han (before), Jin (after)

      Who usually gets the most blame: eunuchs, Cao Cao

      Another damn: Chinese dynasty collapsing

      The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been . . .

       —opening lines of Romance of the Three Kingdoms

       The Story in One Hundred Words or Less

      As the Han dynasty grew more corrupt, peasant revolts unleashed chaos. Warlords carved up the empire among themselves. From this turmoil, three kingdoms gradually emerged:

1. The Kingdom of Wei, led by the devious Cao Cao (pronounced “tsow-tsow”)
2. The Kingdom of Wu, led by the ambitious Sun Quan (pronounced “soon-chewann”)
3. The Kingdom of Shu, led by the virtuous Liu Bei (pronounced “lyoo-bay”)

      Over the next century, the Three Kingdoms fought each other in shifting alliances. Heroes rose and fell. Finally, China was reunified.

       R3K

      The era of the Three Kingdoms has a special place in Chinese culture as a kind of Trojan War, Wild West, and Camelot all rolled into one. It was a conveniently mysterious time into which any saga could be dropped without a lot of backstory. It was a violent, chaotic

      

      era when men made their own destiny, when a person’s moral strength was tested in the crucible of war, when adventure was just down the road or over the next hill. Eventually, in the fourteenth century during the Ming dynasty, Luo Guanzhong bundled all of the accumulated stories together into Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the threea most important novels in Chinese literature.

      In Chinese culture, a name from the era of the Three Kingdoms will likely spark memories of a character from the novel rather than the real historical individual. Cao Cao is a scheming villain. The Zhang brothers who founded the Yellow Turbans are sorcerers and con men. Sun Quan’s sister Sun Shangxiang is the archetype of all tomboy princesses who are surprisingly skilled in the martial arts. Guan Yu, companion and blood brother of Liu Bei, was posthumously promoted to Chinese god of war, so you just know he displayed some awe-inspiring martial prowess in Romance.1

      As with most historical novels, the characters from Romance interact much more directly than they probably did in real life, all having rich personal friendships, loves, and vendettas to drive the story forward. They can be divided into heroes and villains more neatly than real people usually can be. The story is consistently popular; the 2007 film Red Cliff directed by John Woo and based on events from the Three Kingdoms is the highest-grossing film in Chinese history.2

      Now let’s back up and see how this age of chaos unfolded.

       The Beginning: Yellow Turban Rebellion (184–188 CE)

      The first version of the Han dynasty had fallen to Wang Mang (see “Xin Dynasty”) because imperial in-laws held too much power, so when Liu Xiu (Emperor Guangwu) restored the Han dynasty, he tried something different. This time the emperor surrounded himself with eunuchs, who were (literally) cut off from all family connections and presumably would be loyal only to the emperor. Unfortunately, in practice, the eunuchs proved even more selfish than the imperial in-laws because they had to enjoy their power right now, rather than bank it away for their children. During the reign of Emperor Ling (156–189 CE), a clique of palace eunuchs, the Ten Regular Attendants, controlled the government and looted the empire for their own personal gain.

      At

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