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The history of ordinary people doing terrible things [1]

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Date: 2024-01-17  

I recommend everyone take a few minutes to read this sobering essay by historian Patrick Wyman, called Ordinary People Do Terrible Things:

There are two people I think about from time to time. Thanks to the machinations of history, we only know one of their names: Nanaya-ila’i. That wasn’t the name she had been given, and probably wasn’t the name she preferred, but one that was foisted upon her later in life. We have no idea what the second woman, Nanaya-ila’i’s daughter, was called, either by her mother or by the slavers who ripped the two from their place of birth in the territory of Elam and took them to captivity in Assyria. The two women lived and died more than 2,600 years ago in the fading days of the Assyrian Empire, collateral damage in a campaign that saw the utter destruction of Elam, located in today’s southwestern Iran. Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were torn from their homes and marched hundreds of miles to a life of slavery in the city of Aššur, the spiritual heart and namesake of the Assyrian Empire. We only know of their existence, and Nanaya-ila’i’s name, because the two appear in a cuneiform document recording their sale to a merchant some time between 646 and 620 BC. This man, Mannu-kī-Aššūr, paid the price of one mina of silver, about 500 grams for the adult woman and her daughter.

Wyman’s essay, like his podcast “Tides of History”, offers a deep historical perspective on the human experience. We need this perspective because it’s always too easy to obsess over the recent past as though it were fundamentally different from the preceding millennia. We need this perspective to protect ourselves from the grandiose ambitions of modern day imperialists, in their many forms. We need to remember the value of regular, individual lives, and deny the claims of the powerful over our lives and those of other people. And finally, we need to remember how easy it is for seemingly regular people to turn to violence, to profit from violence, to destroy others, and then go back home and continue their lives as though nothing strange or horrible had happened.

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