The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,120

the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China’s Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire’s population, a sixth of the world’s population at the time.13

These figures, of course, cannot all be taken at face value. Some tendentiously blame the entire death toll of a famine or epidemic on a particular war, rebellion, or tyrant. And some came from innumerate cultures that lacked modern techniques for counting and record-keeping. At the same time, narrative history confirms that earlier civilizations were certainly capable of killing in vast numbers. Technological backwardness was no impediment; we know from Rwanda and Cambodia that massive numbers of people can be murdered with low-tech means like machetes and starvation. And in the distant past, implements of killing were not always so low-tech, because military weaponry usually boasted the most advanced technology of the age. The military historian John Keegan notes that by the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, the chariot allowed nomadic armies to rain death on the civilizations they invaded. “Circling at a distance of 100 or 200 yards from the herds of unarmored foot soldiers, a chariot crew—one to drive, one to shoot—might have transfixed six men a minute. Ten minutes’ work by ten chariots would cause 500 casualties or more, a Battle of the Somme–like toll among the small armies of the period.”14

High-throughput massacre was also perfected by mounted hordes from the steppes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks, Magyars, Tatars, Mughals, and Manchus. For two thousand years these warriors deployed meticulously crafted composite bows (made from a glued laminate of wood, tendon, and horn) to run up immense body counts in their sackings and raids. These tribes were responsible for numbers 3, 5, 11, and 15 on the top-twenty-one list, and they take four of the top six slots in the population-adjusted ranking. The Mongol invasions of Islamic lands in the 13th century resulted in the massacre of 1.3 million people in the city of Merv alone, and another 800,000 residents of Baghdad. As the historian of the Mongols J. J. Saunders remarks:There is something indescribably revolting in the cold savagery with which the Mongols carried out their massacres. The inhabitants of a doomed town were obliged to assemble in a plain outside the walls, and each Mongol trooper, armed with a battle-axe, was told to kill so many people, ten, twenty or fifty. As proof that orders had been properly obeyed, the killers were sometimes required to cut off an ear from each victim, collect the ears in sacks, and bring them to their officers to be counted. A few days after the massacre, troops were sent back into the ruined city to search for any poor wretches who might be hiding in holes or cellars; these were dragged out and slain.15

The Mongols’ first leader, Genghis Khan, offered this reflection on the pleasures of life: “The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.”16 Modern genetics has shown this was no idle boast. Today 8 percent of the men who live within the former territory of the Mongol Empire share a Y chromosome that dates to around the time of Genghis, most likely because they descended from him and his sons and the vast number of women they clasped in their arms.17 These accomplishments set the bar pretty high, but Timur Lenk (aka Tamerlane), a Turk who aimed to restore the Mongol Empire, did his best. He slaughtered tens of thousands of prisoners in each of his conquests of western Asian cities, then marked his accomplishment by building minarets out of their skulls. One Syrian eyewitness counted twenty-eight towers of fifteen hundred heads apiece.18

The worst-things list also gives the lie to the conventional wisdom that the 20th century saw a quantum leap in organized violence from a peaceful 19th. For one thing, the 19th century has to be gerrymandered to show such a leap by chopping off the extremely destructive Napoleonic Wars from its beginning. For another, the lull in war in the remainder of the century applies only to Europe. Elsewhere we find many hemoclysms, including the Taiping Rebellion in China (a religiously inspired revolt that was perhaps the worst civil war in history), the African