Credit: Dangerous Minds / Reddit

Asking why someone is interested in history might as well be asking why someone is interested in knowing where they live. The reasons are basically infinite.

There’s the oft-cited reason of “knowing the past means avoiding the mistakes of the future”, which, y’know, is an admirable reason. However, considering that human history just seems to consist of people making the same five basic mistakes over and over and over again with no sign of that letting up any time soon, it’s probably not that. No, what people are really into history for, when we get right down to it, are the stories.

Any kind of story you love, you can find real-life versions of throughout history. Ones that are more mad, surprising, moving and terrifying than any you can find in real life. There are love stories, horror stories, comedies, tragedies, stories of political intrigue, quiet stories that amount to not much more than a kitchen sink drama, yet are incredibly compelling because they were a real-life somebody’s real-life, um, life. Or, y’know, you could just go for the gore.

Because holy shit, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has got nothing on real life. If you’ve ever shown the slightest bit of interest in the darkest things humans have ever done to each other, it’s likely you’ve heard of the ancient Persian torture practise of scaphism. If you’ve heard of it once, chances are you still remember it, because Jesus Rumbling Christ. If one person has suffered this kind of fate, one can only hope it was someone who truly deserved it.

The process is as follows. You’ve got a person who needs to die the most agonising death possible, so you trap them inside two boats. Then, you force-feed them milk and honey by the gallon, then smear the rest on their face.

After that, you send him out to the middle of a swamp and wait. Sounds pretty tranquil, right? Except that’s not the tough part, it’s what comes next. Because you’re not getting force-fed milk and honey for the joy of it, you’re being force-fed milk and honey so that it comes out the other side. And stays there.

Which is when things start getting real fucked. Because swamps are filled with insects. Insects attracted to strong smells and the contents of those two boats after a day or two would be smelling pretty wack. While mosquitoes sting your helpless body, flies and other insects are attracted to everything that just came out of you – they burrow inside it, laying eggs that sprout maggots that eventually crawl inside you, eating you from the inside out… You’d take your chances with Leatherface, wouldn’t you?

Except that’s the other thing about historical stories. A lot of them are bollocks and, thankfully, so is scaphism. It was only written about in one historical source, The Life of Artaxerxes by the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaeronea, who absolutely despised the Persians, painting them throughout his writings as barbarians who were rightly wiped out by Alexander the Great.

That, combined with the fact that Ploutarchos (or Plutarch depending on your translation) was writing of a time hundreds of years before his, paints scaphism as nothing more than slander… History is, after all, written by the winners, something that is always worth bearing in mind, no matter how memorable the stories may be.