You have no idea how lucky you are to live in the present day.
1. The Ottoman Empire's Sultan Ibrahim I had 280 of his concubines drowned in the ocean after one of them slept with another man.
2. In medieval times people were put to death for being witches. One anthropologist conjectures as many as 600,000 "witches" lost their lives.
3. Mexican General Santa Anna had an elaborate state funeral for his amputated leg.
4. Tens of thousands of baby girls were abandoned each year in China because of the country's one-child policy.
5. Before the mid-19th century dentures were commonly made with teeth pulled from the mouths of dead soldiers.
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6. Roman Emperor Gaius made his beloved horse a senator.
7. Ice age Britons used skulls of the dead as cups.
8. After Pope Gregory IX associated cats with devil worship, cats throughout Europe were exterminated in droves.
9. This sudden lack of cats led to the spread of disease because infected rats ran free. The most devastating of these diseases, the Bubonic Plague, killed 100 million people.
10. The Aztecs made human sacrifices to the gods. In 1487, at the dedication of the temple in Tenochtitlan, 20,000 people were put to death.
11. The Mayans also made sacrifices. The most common involved pulling a still-beating heart out of a victim's chest.
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