Five Things You Really Don’t Want to Know
Hello! If you aren’t familiar with this column, please take note of the title, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. Also, if you see your ancestors here, please don’t take offence. It isn’t my fault that all humans, no matter where they are from, are disgusting, perverted, and a little bit dumb. Without further ado, let us begin our exposé on human history.
Ancient Hawaiians, Persians, Egyptians, Everyone Practiced Incest
… Well, some of them, anyway. For the most part, people didn’t marry their sisters. However, for the upper classes, it was a different story.
In pre-contact Hawaii, class was everything. Upper class men would want to marry wives of equal or better status, and for the Big Man himself, who could be equal? Obviously, the solution for a very high-up chief dude would be to marry his own sister. In fact, it was considered best for him to marry as close a relative as possible, the sister being the most ideal case. This was believed to increase the strength, intelligence, and supernatural power of the resulting children.
Ancient Persian nobles had other ideas. While marrying your sister was a good idea, and kept property all in one family, it was metaphysically better for a son to marry his mother. This was because he came from her body, and logically should return to it.
Of course, the Egyptian royal family liked brother-sister marriage for the simple reason that it kept their divine bloodline as concentrated as possible.
And the Hapsburgs… and the Incas…
Rich people, man.
Ancient Egyptian Mummies had Secrets
While everyone is envious of really attractive people, it has to be admitted that beauty has its drawbacks. Beautiful people might be stalked or objectified, but at least nowadays that tends to stop when they die.
In Ancient Egypt, bodies were preserved after death so that its owner would have a happy afterlife. However, the relatives of beautiful people soon ran into a problem. Namely, professional embalmers would have intimate contact with the corpse, by the nature of their job, and some of them would abuse that privilege. By “privilege,” I meant “the body.”
Necrophilia became such a problem that when an attractive person died, their families would let their bodies decompose for a few days in the hot Egyptian sun, to discourage that behaviour.
Note: there are recorded cases of it happening anyway.
Condoms were Weird in Ancient Times
Contrary to popular belief, the ancients did come up with the idea of condoms (it isn’t particularly complicated, after all). The Chinese made them out of oiled silk, which doesn’t sound so bad, but the Japanese made some out of animal horn. You did not misread that- it said animal horn.
In Europe, they made them out of sheep intestine or bladders. Yes, they did remove them from the sheep beforehand.
Again, none of these sound particularly horrifying, until you realize that they were all quite hard to make. As a result, they were all re-usable.
Actually, they had more purposes than just the obvious. There are several examples of old-fashioned condoms in museums today, which were found in old books. Someone, somewhere, was using them as bookmarks.
The Chinese Used… Interesting Things as Medicine
In the mountains of Tibet, there are a number of caterpillars, just minding their own business. However, they are soon cruelly interrupted by a fungus bursting out of their heads, killing them. At this point, humans come and grind them up for medicinal use, which at this point is adding insult to injury.
Other ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine included liquefied human placenta. To make matters worse, it was processed by being buried underground for several years before consumption.
While the following is superstition rather than medicine, a method for keeping your wife from being jealous (i.e. while you were cheating on her) was to wrap a toad in one of her used menstrual pads, and bury it in front of the toilet. This seems entirely legit.
Meanwhile in legend, an old man ate nothing but honey for years until he died. After his death, his body was preserved in honey for a hundred years, before being exhumed and used as medicine. This probably did not happen, but it does elicit the question: who came up with that?
To relieve bone pains (if you are a supervillain), the cure involved ground-up bones of babies, which is sad. Another disease had to be cured by a piece of human skull, which, according to doctors, had to be stir-fried before making it into broth.
It is hardly surprising that many Confucian philosophers were against the use of human body parts as medicine, declaring their use to be “very rude and inhumane.” “Rude” is not perhaps the obvious choice in words, but I suppose it does apply.
In Fact, All Ancient Medicine was Dodgy
It was a common characteristic. In ancient times, wherever you went, you would find doctors with very, very strange ideas.
For example, in Ancient Greece, dogs would sometimes be used in medicine. Not as stress therapy, but to lick open wounds. Meanwhile, Alexandrian doctors did experiments by cutting pigs’ veins and arteries and observing the noises they made (the pigs, not the blood vessels).
In ancient Rome, drinking the still-warm blood of a dead gladiator was considered good for inducing pregnancy. Other ideas were just bizarre – for example, Pliny claimed that semen was good for scorpion stings. Then again, this was the same guy who said that you should fill cavities with the ashes of mouse, raven, and sparrow dung.
The Pharaoh in Egypt had a special doctor who had one job – giving him enemas, or in layperson’s terms, sticking things up his ass. In fact, this doctor’s official title was “Neru Pehut,” which means “Shepherd of the Asshole.”
Other ancient doctors should be looked upon with awe. For example, the Iraqi doctor Ahmad ibn Abi al-Ash’ath was one of the earliest to describe how full stomachs behave while digesting food. How did he find out? Animal experimentation, of course – using living lions. Seriously, dude, didn’t you have access to cats or rats or anything? Possibly he was just showing off.
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