Aaron Mahnke

And then there are the times when the condemned are forced to pay the most precious currency of all.

Life itself.

I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore.

There has always been some form of capital punishment.

No matter where or when in history you lived, if you messed up badly enough, you might be put to death.

And while today we try to prevent what's known as cruel and unusual punishment, let's just say that for much of human history, cruel and unusual was kind of the goal.

Take this tactic from way back in the 23rd century BCE, one of the earliest execution methods we know of, in fact, and you can thank pre-imperial China for this creative bit of gore.

It was called the Five Punishments, and as the title suggests, it had five distinct steps.

1.

Tattooing 2.

Cutting off the nose 3.

Cutting off one or both of the feet 4.

Castration 5.

Death

And number five, by the way, was dealt out via strangulation, decapitation, or for the real ne'er-do-wells, the cheery little something called death by slicing that I would rather not go into here.

You see, in ancient China, it was believed that the body did not belong to you.

It was a gift from your parents.

So if you really wanted to punish someone, then messing up that precious gift was pretty much the worst thing you could do to a person.

Ancient Egyptians placed a similar importance on a pristine body, but for different reasons.

They believed that in order to have a good time in the afterlife, you needed to stay intact after death.