It can be said that human sacrifice is barbaric. But many times, some people are not passive martyrs, but take the initiative to commit suicide. For example, the four ladies-in-waiting who died for Nurhachi all died of their own free will, instead of being forced as big princess Abahai did. In the early days, martyrdom for the venerable is a kind of treatment and honor, so the way to end one's life by martyrdom is very simple, that is, suicide; The way passive martyrs end their lives is naturally killing people. But he didn't kill people in one way. They were all executed in secret. Now, the method of executing martyrs clearly recorded in ancient books can be found in the method of "hanging" martyrs after Judy's death. This has been written in detail above, so I won't say much here. One thing is that before hanging, the person in charge will arrange a delicious meal for the martyrs. Those with high status will be sent to their rooms separately, while those with low status will generally get together for a group dinner. This "last supper" is quite rich, but because of the fear of impending death, I am afraid no one has the heart to eat it. In most cases, she burst into tears and cried loudly at the scene, just like Judy's martyr recorded in history books. In addition to forcing him to hang himself, it is also a common means of "poisoning" martyrs. How did Zhu Yuanzhang's concubine die? Some people say that eunuchs hanged themselves. However, there are other folk sayings, one of which is to forcibly feed the selected maids with mercury. Mercury is highly toxic and dies immediately after eating. Why use mercury? It is said that the bodies of martyrs poisoned by mercury have not rotted for a long time and are still vivid for many years. The phenomenon that corpses don't rot has been recorded in unofficial history, a tomb raider in China. For example, Liu Qu, the king of Guang Chuan when Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty proclaimed the Emperor, was a robber. Once, I went to dig a cemetery. After opening the tomb, I found that there were more than 100 bodies in the tomb, one next to the other, but strangely, none of them rotted.
It can be speculated that these women are martyrs, and their bodies have not rotted for hundreds of years. Ge Hong, a native of A Jin, recorded this event in Xijing Miscellanies. The appearance of a martyr is quite similar to that of mercury poisoning. There is also a kind of "buried alive", in which the hands and feet of the martyrs are tied, put into a certain posture (modeling), and then buried quickly. In order to make martyrs lose their ability to resist, they are sometimes "euthanized" with things like anesthetics. During archaeological excavations, some female martyrs' limbs were found to have traces of being tied by ropes, which should have been forcibly buried at that time. Some women are buried with their limbs bent sideways and their faces facing men, which is a gesture (or maybe not) that has been fiddled after death, and it is a kind of modeling. People who die of natural causes can't have that kind of "prescribed action". Tomb No.45 in Xishuipo, Puyang, Henan Province, found in 1987. The owner of the tomb is a man, and his height is about 1.84 meters. He was buried on his back with his head facing south and his feet facing north. There are three niches in the east, west and north of the tomb, and each niche has a child's remains in different directions. Experts believe that these three children were martyred and stereotyped after being beaten alive. Of course, there are many ways to end a martyr's life. The most direct and convenient way is to "behead" and directly take the martyr to the cemetery to kill him. However, this method was abandoned by later generations because it could not preserve the whole. Later generations pay attention to the whole corpse, and the way of hunting will not be decapitation, but direct bloodletting and stabbing. Therefore, beheading is often used in early or human sacrifices. In the archaeology of the tombs of slave owners in slave society, it is often found that the heads of martyrs are regularly arranged together, while the bodies are placed in another place, presumably beheaded before death.
There is also a custom that ancient people built tombs with heads as sacrifices. At different stages of grave robbery, human heads were cut down as sacrifices like pig heads and dog heads. At present, the tomb M 100 1 in Yin Ruins has more than 164 martyrs, and 96 people share the same cave with the tomb owner. There is a large sacrificial pit nearby, which contains a large number of human bones, all of which are incomplete. These martyrs should be beheaded at the end of their lives. There are 34 heads in tomb WKGM 1 regularly. These are the heads of martyrs. They should be cut off and buried.