People will go to almost any length today for status, sacrificing whatever it takes for a brush with fame, for the chance to appear special. But that’s nothing new, not a product of media saturation or any other sort of modern condition. Desperation didn’t start with us. Earlier today, I came across this 2009 New York Times article about palace attendants in the ancient city of Ur, who angled for jobs that would provide them with a fleeting sense of importance before resulting in their brutal deaths. An excerpt:

“A new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered in Iraq almost a century ago, appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists say.

Palace attendants, as part of royal mortuary ritual, were not dosed with poison to meet a rather serene death. Instead, a sharp instrument, a pike perhaps, was driven into their heads…There were two round holes in the soldier’s cranium and one in the woman’s, each about an inch in diameter. But the most convincing evidence, Dr. Monge said in an interview, were cracks radiating from the holes. Only if the holes were made in a living person would they have produced such a pattern of fractures along stress lines. The more brittle bones of a person long dead would shatter like glass, she explained.

Dr. Monge surmised that the holes were made by a sharp instrument and that death ‘by blunt-force trauma was almost immediate.’

Ritual killing associated with a royal death was practiced by other ancient cultures, archaeologists say, and raises a question: Why would anyone, knowing their probable fate, choose a life as a court attendant?

‘It’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand,’ Dr. Monge said. ‘But in the culture these were positions of great honor, and you lived well in the court, so it was a trade-off. Besides, the movement into the next world was not for them necessarily something to fear.'”