[0xbadcafebee]

I don't know if Sparta would crack the top 10 for me.

The Celts, if the Roman authors are to be believed, were pretty metal. Sacrifice, impalement, hanging severed limbs or running into battle with them (naked, drenched in their blood), etc.

Vikings were pretty brutal, both in their raiding/raping/pillaging/murder, and their treatment of slaves, their enemies, and people who committed crimes. Slaves [typically female] were killed and buried with their masters (similar to Egyptian and other ancient cultures), but not before being gang-raped in a drug/alcohol stupor and stabbed to death.

Medieval Europe could be pretty atrocious. Besides the harshness of life for most of the population and their indebtedness to the nobility and church, punishments were often incredibly brutal for even minor crimes, and many punishments extended to not adhering to religious dogma. Plenty of ethnic and religious cleansing to go around then too.

The Maori, Hawaiians, and other polynesian groups could be pretty brutal, torturing, killing and eating their victims. Ritual sacrifice of slaves was common, sometimes throwing children into the sea (the Guanches).

African American slaves (you know, the people whose labor we built our nation on, during/after which we committed ethnic genocide against all the native peoples here?) were worse treated than Helots. At least Helots got to live quasi-normal lives, keeping some of their produce, raising families, having homes. We killed something like three Nazi Holocausts-worth of African Americans, after brutalizing them for centuries. So Western Culture definitely is up there with the most brutal societies.

Native Americans could be pretty brutal too, regularly involved with scalping, skinning, torturing, on occasion forcing their victims to consume... themselves.

Nazi-era Germany and the USSR were also pretty brutal, with Russia having a muuuuch larger death toll, literally starving their own citizens in addition to the work/death camps for crimes such as political disagreement, wrong ethnicity/gender/sexual identity, and various crimes.

But, yeah, Aztecs win the most-fucked-up-practices-in-history award.

[caesil]

The systematic, public aspect of the killings and the fetishization of maximal pain and suffering is the fucked up part. Few societies ever where public delight in unthinkable cruelty was so off-the-charts.

[0xbadcafebee]

Medieval European punishments and torture included (these had big crowds, when not done in a dungeon, and were often for "ceremonial" (religious) reasons):

- put the person in an immobile metal suit and hang them and leave them for days so crowds can throw stuff at them and taunt them. if they didn't die from exposure they'd certainly be emotionally damaged

- put someone's feet in a metal boot, and then drive wedges into the boot to slowly break all the bones in their feet

- clamp blocks with spikes around the knee, and tighten them down until the knee is totally destroyed

- clamp a person's fingers in a vice and screw until broken. this can be done for days, weeks, as they won't die, and more torture methods still await

- waterboarding. doesn't sound bad, but being repeatedly drowned for hours is, well, not fun

- putting somebody in a sack, with a dog, a snake, and a rat, and throwing them in the water to watch what happened

- tying a person to a giant wheel, smashing their limbs until they were dead, and then hoisting the wheel up for the public to gawk at

- clamp a sort of clawed device onto a woman's breast, and tighten it down until it rips her breast off

- cutting off heads, putting them on spikes, adorning the town or a castle with them (seems quaint in comparison)

- tie a person to a rack, and literally cut all the skin off their body while they are alive. they would die from either shock or blood loss, this is a quicker death than many others

- tying someone to a rack, slowly stretching them until their bones and skin broke, and then dragging them over to the scaffold where they'd be burned alive

- make a sharp metal narrow pyramid and lower a person down on it until it penetrates their anus

- tie the person to a table, attach a cage to their chest, put a rat in the cage, and apply fire to the other end of the cage. the rat claws and gnaws its way through the body of this live person

- tie somebody to a chair made of spikes, and slowly push them towards a fire

- tie somebody upside down, legs spread, and literally saw them in half, from the anus to the head

Soooooooooooo..... yeah..... fetishization of maximal pain and suffering..... honestly, I'm gonna call it, the Aztecs were amateurs compared to us.

[soulofmischief]

As an engineer though you can't help but marvel at the pace of innovation in torture engineering during Medieval Europe.

A lot of the designs are quite clever. That said, I pray I never come anywhere near any of those devices.