The short version
You hear a gruesome story from the past and think, "Surely that's been exaggerated." Some of these stories really have been embellished.
But not all of them are urban legends.
In the Atlantic slave trade, people were laid out packed tight in the holds of slave ships and held down with shackles and other restraints. Diagrams, restraint devices, eyewitness accounts and parliamentary records all confirm it. The famous 1788 stowage diagram of the slave ship Brookes arranges human beings exactly the way you'd arrange cargo.
Then there's the Behistun inscription from around 521 BCE, in which Darius I says that rebels were flayed and their skins stuffed with straw and hung up. In 1107 in Isfahan, the sources record that Ahmad ibn Attash was skinned alive, and a medieval chronicle even says his skin was stuffed with straw.
Japan had its own version: the heads of executed criminals were publicly displayed (gokumon and sarashikubi). The forms differ, but they share one thing: the body is no longer treated as a person. It becomes an object of shipping efficiency, a warning sign for those in power, or a tool for making an example of someone.
Looking at this history, "human rights matter" stops sounding like a pretty slogan and starts looking like a very practical safety mechanism.
1. What got mixed up at first: "scaphism" and slave ships
What I first remembered was "a cruel punishment where a person is fixed inside something like a boat."
Two different stories tend to get blended here.
One is scaphism. It's an execution method in ancient Persia, reported by Plutarch citing Ctesias, in which a person is pinned between two troughs. Its historicity is disputed, though. Encyclopaedia Iranica also notes that accounts derived from Ctesias suffer from literary exaggeration and source problems, and that it's doubtful this method was ever actually carried out.
The other is the slave ships of the Atlantic slave trade.
The evidence here is of a completely different kind. Ship plans, parliamentary records, shackles, contemporary accounts and voyage data all survive.
So the memory of "people laid out crammed together inside a ship" belongs not to scaphism but to the Middle Passage, the sea crossing that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
2. The Brookes diagram is chilling because it isn't a torture device blueprint
The Library of Congress holds a stowage diagram of the slave ship Brookes, made around 1788.
It's a plan view, as if the ship were sliced open from above, and it shows the bodies of men, women and children lined up in neat, tight rows.
That alone is strange enough, but there's something worse.
This diagram wasn't drawn to depict a device for maximizing cruelty. It visualizes a transport and profit question: how many human beings can we fit in?
According to the Smithsonian, the diagram shows about 450 people, yet on its 1786 voyage the Brookes carried 609.
So it doesn't stop at "wow, that's way too crammed" when you look at the famous picture. Voyages that carried even more people than the diagram shows are documented.
Don't turn "human Tetris" into a real-life business metric. That's the whole point.
3. "Fixed to a bed" is off. "Laid down in a low hold and restrained" is more accurate
One detail of that memory needs a small correction.
It doesn't mean each person was put on a modern-style bed and chained to the bed frame.
The Smithsonian's Middle Passage exhibit explains that captives were packed below deck, unable to stand, and sometimes could barely even turn over. Actual shackles of the kind used on these ships also survive as physical artifacts.
The Brookes diagram also shows shelves and platforms added to create extra layers of space for holding people.
In short:
lay people down in a low space → add shelves → restrain them → pack in even more
What's being done is close to optimizing warehouse volume.
The difference is that what was being packed in wasn't goods. It was human beings.
4. "Flaying a person and stuffing the skin with straw" isn't pure invention
Here, too, it helps to separate the sources by strength.
First, ancient Persia.
The Behistun inscription of Darius I records that, in putting down the revolts of 521 BCE, the main rebels were flayed and their skins were stuffed with straw and hung up.
This isn't the level of "someone read a book of later ghost stories." It's an inscription commemorating the king's own reign.
Of course, a royal inscription isn't a neutral newspaper. It's political propaganda, a document in which the crown boasts, "this is how we punished them." So rather than believing every detail unconditionally, the important fact is at least this: the Achaemenid monarchy recorded that kind of bodily punishment as a public symbol of victory.
Then the Middle Ages.
According to Encyclopaedia Iranica, in 1107 in Isfahan, the Ismaili leader Ahmad ibn Attash was paraded through the city and then skinned alive.
A medieval chronicle compared in research from the University of Chicago also says he died after being flayed and that his skin was stuffed with straw.
The sources are too specific to dismiss as "just a medieval-sounding invention."
5. Japan's displayed heads were also a system for "turning the body into media"
Japanese history has a different version of the same idea.
In the Edo period, gokumon, the practice of displaying a beheaded criminal's head in a place the public could see, is confirmed both as an institution and in actual cases. In the materials on Nezumi Kozo Jirokichi, a famous thief, introduced by the National Diet Library, we can confirm that he was beheaded in 1832 and that his head was displayed on the gokumon platform at Kozukappara, one of Edo's execution grounds.
Of course, calling slave ships, gokumon and flaying "all the same" would be sloppy.
Their purposes, systems and forms of harm all differ.
Still, they share one technique.
Turning the body into a communication device.
On the slave ship, the body was "transportable labor." In the displayed head, it was "a warning from the law and power." In processing and displaying skin, it was "a political message making visible the fate of rebels."
The corpse, or the body itself, has become a notice board.
6. The core of the cruelty isn't only that "there were bad people"
Looking at this history, it's tempting to wrap up with "people in the past were just cruel."
But that misses the scariest part.
Not everyone who produced the Brookes stowage diagram needed to wake up in the morning thinking, "Today I'm going to make people suffer."
What's needed is much simpler.
A system that lets you treat human beings as:
- goods
- units of transport
- a deterrent example against rebellion
- a notice posted for the legal order
Once that is in place, cruelty can be carried out not just through individual abnormality but as an ordinary business workflow.
"How many fit?" "How many will die?" "How many have to arrive for this to turn a profit?"
The moment it can be turned into that kind of conversation, human suffering becomes just another column in an Excel sheet.
That's the most brutal part.
7. That's why, with histories of cruelty, we should separate "is it true?"
Even so, believing the most gruesome stories without question is risky too.
Even in this article alone, the strength of the evidence varies.
Very strong
- The Brookes stowage diagram: the printed diagram survives, along with records of the legal and institutional context.
- Overcrowding and restraint in the Middle Passage: multiple sources, including museum collections, restraint devices, testimony and voyage records.
- The 1107 flaying alive of Ahmad ibn Attash: recorded by Iranica on the basis of medieval sources.
- Japan's gokumon and displayed heads: legal history and specific execution records exist.
Sources exist, but read with care
- "Skin stuffed with straw" in the Behistun inscription: extremely important as a royal inscription close to the events, but also the crown's self-promotion.
Historicity is debated
- Scaphism: it relies heavily on a story derived from Ctesias, and some scholars doubt it was ever practiced.
Don't toss everything into one box labeled "anything goes, it was the old days."
The more a cruelty shocks you, the more calmly you should do your source criticism.
That actually makes the abnormality of what really happened stand out even more.
8. Seen through history, "human rights matter" gets very concrete
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, prohibits slavery, and prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Read as text alone, it can look like an obvious slogan.
Put history behind it, and the meaning changes.
"You must not make a human being someone's property." "You must not optimize human beings as cargo." "The state must not do what it likes to bodies in order to make an example." "You must not erase a person's personhood to turn them into a tool of power or profit."
Because these are barriers against things that were actually done in the past.
Human rights aren't a moral poster saying "let's all get along."
They're a mechanism for drawing, in advance, a line that must not be crossed even in situations where treating people as things makes everything more efficient.
After looking at this history, that line looks very necessary indeed.
References
- Library of Congress, “Stowage of the British slave ship ‘Brookes’ under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788”
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98504459/ - Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “The Middle Passage”
https://www.americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/on-the-water/online/living-atlantic-world/forced-crossings/middle-passage - Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “Olaudah Equiano” / Brookes and shackles
https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/on-the-water/education/life-sea/equiano - Livius, Behistun inscription, section ii.32
https://www.livius.org/articles/place/behistun/behistun-3 - Encyclopaedia Iranica, “ʿAṭṭāš”
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attas-or-ebn-attas-ahmad-b/ - University of Chicago, Reconstructing Alamut (medieval chronicle comparison)
https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1894/files/Hajiani_uchicago_0330D_14852.pdf - Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Torture in the Achaemenid Period”
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/torture-achaemenid-period/ - National Diet Library Monthly Bulletin, No. 658 (record of the gokumon display of Nezumi Kozo Jirokichi)
https://dl.ndl.go.jp/view/download/digidepo_9614581_po_geppo1602.pdf?contentNo=1 - United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
