Quote:
Originally Posted by Tywyll
We aren't talking about modern warriors with modern sensibilities. As awful as the real world is, there has been some increase in general empathy and horror. But remember, it wasn't that long ago that the Nazis made lamp shades out of human skin.
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And you can still see extreme brutality today in certain areas of the world, with videos of beheadings and worse.
I think there's always been a mixture of brutality and empathy. We like to think we invented empathy but you can see quite a lot of it in the Ugaritic texts of Canaanite myths from around 1200 BC which you can find in
Stories of Ancient Canaan. The book is fairly short and I thought it was well worth the read. You can also see what we tend to think of as modern sensibilities in the Book of Job, which has some overlap with the Ugaritic texts.
For that matter, we also like to think we invented engineering but the clockwork device, the
Antikythera mechanism was made somewhere between 205 BC and 87 BC. It makes me wonder how much tech that we don't know about has just dissolved over time.
The more I learn of ancient texts and culture, the less advanced we seem...