Aaron Mahnke

Hence the whole mummies thing.

And suffice to say, Egyptian executions reflected this.

Everything from murder to tomb robbing to perjury in courts could earn you a messy death.

While nobles were usually allowed to drink poison, ordinary citizens weren't so lucky.

Techniques included being buried alive, impaled on a stake, and, my personal least favorite, being fed alive to a crocodile.

Some crimes even had specific corresponding penalties.

For example, children who killed their parents would have finger-sized pieces cut out of them with a sharp reed before being burned alive on a bed of thorns.

Pleasant stuff, for sure.

In classical Greece, they tried to keep things a bit more civil.

Tried being the operative word here.

You see, the Greeks believed that committing a murder, even in the context of execution, left behind a hideous spiritual stain called a miasma.

And so they came up with ways to kill someone without, well, actually killing them.

Things like throwing the convicted into a deep pit and just leaving them there, or tying them to a board before abandoning them to the elements.

You see, the state didn't really kill anyone, just left people outside for a while.

And if that person happened to die, well, no harm, no foul.

By the way, that tie-to-a-board method is sometimes called a bloodless crucifixion, which, yes, I hate as much as you do.

Much more rarely, people were forced to drink hemlock, the famous death of Socrates being one of those examples.

But to be honest, it was a pretty short-lived trend.

Glee was on TV for longer than Greece's hemlock phase.

Now, I know that ancient Greece and ancient Rome are sometimes spoken of interchangeably, but believe me when I say that the Romans had a very different approach to executions.