Your Life as a Eunuch in Every Ancient Civilization

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Sometime around the 21st century BC, in a city called Lagash, somebody sharpened a copper blade and changed the next 3,000 years of human politics. The unic was about to become the most powerful person in 11 civilizations. And you, friend, are next in line. From Sumer to Constantinople, from the herums of Procepilus to the Forbidden City, the same job description shows up over and over again. Trusted with the kingdom, forbidden from leaving offspring, quietly running everything while the king takes the credit. Today you find out exactly how the worst day of your life turned into the steadiest career in the ancient world. Legash 21st century BC. Welcome to history. The bureaucrats of ancient Sumer kept very detailed records. Uniform tablets from the city of Lagash mentioned something nobody had bothered to write down before. A category of palace official called the Gersku. And to be a Gersku, you had to be missing a couple of important pieces.

[00:00:50]This is the earliest written evidence of the institution of the unic on earth.

[00:00:54]And it shows up not at the edges of society but at the absolute top of it.

[00:00:57]The court of Lagash where the king ate his bread was already running on staff who could not biologically speaking plot to put their kids on the throne. Why?

[00:01:06]Because dynasties are messy. If your most powerful adviser has children, those children grow up. Those children get land. Those children's grandchildren become a rival dynasty. And three generations from now your great grandkids are getting stabbed in a temple by some smug noble whose great grandpa once signed your tax forms. Unix solved that problem permanently. Their loyalty has nowhere else to go. The Sumerianss figured this out before they figured out paper. Your Sumerian career path. Temple servant, royal chamberlain, possibly a manager of the wool industry, which was a much bigger deal than it sounds. You wear linen, you eat bread and beer, you live longer than nearly everyone outside the palace because you eat better. And when the kings of Akad start showing up to flatten the place around 2334 BC, you do what Unix always do. You simply work for the new boss.

[00:01:51]The job outlasts the empire. It will keep outlasting empires for the next 3,000 years. Egypt wants your brain, not your beard. Move forward a millennium.

[00:02:00]You are now in the Egyptian court somewhere between the old kingdom paperwork piles and a tomic poisoning.

[00:02:06]The Egyptians had a quirk that scholars still argue about. Their version of the unic was sometimes very literally castrated. And sometimes the word just meant highranking guy whose loyalty is so absolute we treat him as if. Egyptian texts use a single sign, sometimes translated as unic, sometimes as official. And there is real archaeological back and forth on whether figures like Piper in the Joseph story were physically Unix or just bureaucrats who never made it into the gossip column. The skeletal evidence has only recently caught up. In 2017, researchers re-examined tomeic period bones from the Questna necropolis and found a small group of male skeletons with hormone related bone development consistent with pre-puberty castration. Translation: There were real identifiable surgical unics in Egypt and they were buried with the dignity of priests. So this was never a fringe thing. Your Egyptian job is not the herm job that comes later in other empires. Here you are an administrator. You manage the grainery.

[00:03:02]You count cattle. You read foreign letters from the Hittite court because you, unlike most of the nobility, have the patience to learn cuneaoiform without complaining. By the time Cleopatra is on the throne, the senior unic in the palace, a man named Pthenus, is running the actual government of Egypt, while teenage Tommy I 13th, is busy losing a civil war. Pthanus is the one who decides Pompy the Great should be murdered on a beach in 48 BC. You, in this scenario, are filing the paperwork for that decision. Welcome to imperial level decision-making with no possibility of personally inheriting any of it. Assyria builds the operating system. By the early 9th century BC, an Assyrian king called Asherpal II takes the loose Sumerian and Egyptian model and turns it into a proper institution.

[00:03:46]The word in Acadian is shares, literally one of the head because the unic shaved his face and you could spot him a mile off in court reliefs. He is the only beardless guy in a palace full of beards. There are reliefs in the British Museum where you can play spot the unic and win every single time. Under Assurance and his successors, the Rab Sharesi, the chief unic becomes one of the seven highest ranking officers in the empire. He sits next to the treasurer, the cupbearer, the chief judge, the grand vazier, the palace herald, and the commander-in-chief. Half of those positions are themselves often filled by Unix. Some of these guys, like Shaushu, raise their own armies and lead campaigns. Reliefs at Nimrude show Unic officers receiving foreign kings at the gate, taking tribute and standing one step behind the king at every public ritual. There is a moment in 626 BC that should not be possible. A unic named Sin Shumulashir actually claims the Assyrian throne for himself during a succession crisis. He doesn't last long. The empire is collapsing anyway, but the man who could not have children technically becomes king of Assyria. The system was working so well, it almost replaced the people it was supposed to serve. What's in it for you? The Neoasyrian unic is essentially a senior civil servant with no exit options. You will be promoted on merit because nobody in the palace cares who your father was and frankly your father gave you up. You will eat off bronze. You will travel. You will probably not die in battle because senior officials rarely do. You will, however, almost certainly die in a palace coup because the late Assyrian court runs on backstabbing the way our age runs on quarterly reports. Persia, where the unic becomes the kingmaker.

[00:05:20]The Persians inherit the Assyrian system after Cyrus the Great rolls into Babylon in 539 BC and they do what Persians always do, which is take a working idea and make it bigger, godier, and more dangerous. The Akeeminid court has a small army of Unix organized into specific titles with control over access to the great king himself. Greek historians like Satzius write about this with their hair on fire, partly because they find it shocking and partly because it makes great copy. back home in Athens. Enter the most famous unic in Persian history, a man named Begoas, there were actually two Beo Acases, and you really do need to know the difference. The first Begoas around 340 BC was the chief minister of Artiserxes III, and he took court politics about as far as it could possibly go. He poisoned Artiserxes III. He installed Artiserxes I. He poisoned Artiserxes I installed Darius III, who was supposed to be his puppet. Darius III, having watched two emperors die in a row, did not feel like being the third. So when Begois tried to poison him too, Darius forced him to drink his own cup. Diodoris Siculus describes this with obvious satisfaction. The man who killed two kings of Persia died gargling on his own poison. The second Begoas a generation later was a young court unic favored by Darius III. And then when Alexander the Great rolled in and Darius died by Alexander himself, he was reportedly very, very handsome. He won a dance contest at Alexander's victory festival in Carmenia. He lived a much quieter life than his namesake, which in Persian court terms means he died in bed. If you are a Persian court unic, your day involves these things. Managing access to the king, supervising the women's quarters, escorting foreign ambassadors, possibly getting taught a second or third language so you can negotiate with Egyptians or Greeks, and watching everybody else die before you do. Your salary is paid in silver. Your political ceiling is essentially unlimited. Your life expectancy depends entirely on whether you know how to back the right faction. The Greeks sneer, then hire you anyway. Here is something the Greeks would never admit out loud. They thought Unix were a degenerate eastern habit, an insult to manhood, a sign of barbarian decadence, and they wrote about it in tones of pure horror in basically every classical text from Heroditus onwards.

[00:07:30]Then the Hellenistic period happens.

[00:07:32]Alexander dies, his generals carve up the Mediterranean, and almost every single one of those new Greek kingdoms quietly adopts the Persian court system.

[00:07:39]Unix and all. So much for principles.

[00:07:42]Your life as a Hellenistic Unic can look surprisingly successful. Take Hermes of Atarnius. He was a slave who rose to rule a small kingdom in northwestern Anatolia in the 4th century BC. Ancient sources call him a unic, although modern scholars suspect that may have been a slur from his political enemies. Either way, he ran his own city. He was a former student at Plato's Academy, and he was Aristotle's patron and father-in-law. Aristotle lived in his court, married his niece Pyas, and wrote a hymn for him after the Persians captured and crucified him in 341 BC. So if your retirement plan involves have Aristotle write you a hymn, you could do worse. Then there is Filoteras of Pergamon and his story is one of the strangest in this whole tour. According to his successor, Adalus I, baby Filletteras was carried into a crowd, got pressed against people, and had his testicles crushed by accident. He grew up to become the keeper of the treasury at Pergamon for the general Lasimicus.

[00:08:34]When Lysmicus' family imploded around 282 BC, Filiteras quietly switched sides, kept the treasury for himself, and used it to bankroll an entire new kingdom. He never married. He had no biological heirs. He passed the throne to his nephew, who passed it to his nephew, and so on. And the dynasty that began with a baby's accident in a Greek crowd, ruled Pergamon for 150 years, and built one of the great libraries of the ancient world. Your career path in this case is found a kingdom. Leave it to your nephew. Get a city named after him.

[00:09:05]Rome has a problem and her name is Sibel. Rome shows up to this party with a complicated face. The Roman state did not officially run on Unix. There were no Roman shahi, no rabb unic sitting next to the consul. Roman freeborn male citizens were forbidden by law from castrating themselves and the very idea of a Roman magistrate without a beard would have caused a riot in the forum.

[00:09:24]But Rome did import Unix and Rome did have a problem in the form of a goddess.

[00:09:28]In 204 BC during the second Punic War, a Roman delegation went to a sanctuary in Friia and brought back a black meteorite that was the official body of the goddess Cyle, also called the Magnamater, the great mother. The Romans, desperate for any divine help against Hannibal, installed her on the Palatine Hill. The problem is that Sibelli's priests, the GI, had a particular theological tradition. They castrated themselves with a sharp piece of pottery. In public during an annual festival on the 24th of March called the dy sanguinis, the day of blood, the galley wore yellow robes, jewelry, and women's hairstyles. They danced. They flogged themselves until they bled. They begged in the streets carrying images of Sibellle on their backs. And the Roman Senate, having officially adopted this goddess as the savior of the republic, had to find a way to permit her cult while forbidding her actual rituals to its own citizens. Their solution, only foreigners could be GI. Roman citizens were not allowed to castrate themselves for the goddess until the emperor Claudius finally relaxed the rules in the 1st century AD, presumably because by then Rome had bigger problems. Your life as a GI in Rome is loud. You live in a temple complex on the Palatine. You dance during the day of blood. And most Romans would rather not look at you. The poet Collus wrote a horrified hundredline poem about a young man named Addis castrating himself in religious frenzy and then immediately regretting it. The Satarist juveniles sneered about you and yet the cult survives. The goddess stays on her hill and you are never run out of town because you are technically saving the city from supernatural disaster every spring. The empire that swore it would never tolerate Unix in government had by the late Roman period Unix running the imperial bed chamber, the wardrobe and the personal guard. Theodocious's grand chamberlain Utropius even became consul of the Eastern Empire in 399 AD. the only unic ever to hold that office before being executed for the crime of having held it. China sends you to the silkworm house. China is where the unic reaches industrial scale. The institution starts as far back as the Shang dynasty in the second millennium B.C. gets formalized under the first Chin Emperor in 221 BC and runs continuously with one short Sui era pause until 1912 when the last Chinese imperial unic retired and the dynasty itself ceased to exist. That is roughly 3,400 years of consecutive operation. No other Chinese institution comes close.

[00:11:45]Yhan dynasty entry to the profession had two flavors. Flavor one, castration as legal punishment. The state had a sentence called the gong shing, sometimes translated with grim Chinese poetry as being sent to the silkworm house because new unics convoles in heated draft-free rooms the way silkworm cocoons did. The historian Simma Chien, the man who wrote the records of the grand historian and gave us most of what we know about early Chinese history, was castrated in 99 BC for the crime of defending a disgraced general in front of Emperor Wu. He could have killed himself, which was the proper aristocratic reaction. Instead, he chose castration so he could finish his book.

[00:12:23]He finished his book. Flavor two, and this is the more common one for ambitious families, was voluntary recruitment. Poor families would offer up a son. The operation would happen if the boy survived. He had a job for life inside the palace. The procedure recorded in detail for the later Ming andqing periods was performed in a hut just outside the palace gates by a hereditary specialist family called the B family. The fee was six silver tales.

[00:12:47]The local anesthetic was hot chili sauce. The patient was bound at the legs and waist. The cut removed the entire genital apparatus in one stroke. A plug was inserted into the urethra and left there for 3 days. If the urine flowed when the plug was pulled, you were a unic. If it did not, you were a corpse.

[00:13:03]Survival estimates from theQing era hover around 2/3. You also kept the removed parts. The pieces went into a sealed box called the bow, the treasure, which traveled with you for the rest of your life and got buried with you so you would arrive in the afterlife technically intact. This was not a metaphor. The treasure could be confiscated by your superiors if you misbehaved, and recovering it became a career-defining priority. You could be the second most powerful man in the empire and still spend your free evenings worrying about the location of a small wooden box. If you survived, the rewards could be enormous. Kylan unic of the Han imperial workshops perfected the formula for paper around 105 AD. The book and the printed word as we know them descend from a man who was castrated in 75 AD. The Tang court at its peak housed thousands of Unix and they essentially controlled the imperial palace army deposing several emperors in the late 9th century. And the most famous of all, Jung-He was a Muslim boy from Yunan who was captured during the Ming reconquest at the age of around 12.

[00:14:01]Castrated, sent to the prince's household, and three decades later was sailing the largest fleet the world had ever seen, 300 ships and 28,000 men, all the way to East Africa and back. He brought a giraffe home. The Ming court genuinely believed it was a Keelin, a Chinese unicorn, and treated it as a divine omen, confirming the mandate of heaven. You can do a lot with a giraffe and good timing. India, the Mahabarata and the Hijra. India had its own version with deep, deep roots. The Hydra community of South Asia traces itself, at least in living tradition, all the way back to the Mahabharata. In one famous episode, the warrior Arjuna spends a year in exile under a curse that turns him into a third gender figure named Brihanala, who teaches dance to the women of King Verata's palace. In another, the warrior Aravan asks to be married before his ritual sacrifice the next day, and no woman will agree. So the god Krishna takes the form of a beautiful woman named Moini and marries him for one night. Hidras and Tamil Nadu still call themselves Aravanis after this story. They reenact the marriage every year at the Kuvagam festival. The historical institution itself is older than any Mughal era reorganization though it certainly was reorganized by them. References to a third gender category sometimes called Napum Saka appear in the Kama Sutra around the 3rd century AD in the Manismidi and in early Buddhist texts.

[00:15:18]The Artha Shastra, the great political handbook of Katilia, lists Unix as palace staff in the 4th century BC before the Greeks even noticed. Your role as an Indian unic in this earlier period before the Delhi Sultanate gets there is partly a religious figure, partly a court servant, partly a wandering performer. You attend births and weddings and you bless or curse the household with songs. People give you money to leave or to stay depending on whether they liked your blessing. You are inside the system without being a man of the system. Whether you are a forcibly castrated palace slave like the ones the later sultanss used or a voluntary religious devote your social location is complicated. The British when they showed up found this confusing and criminalized the entire community in 1871 under a law called the criminal tribes act. India officially recognized hedras as a third gender again in 2014.

[00:16:06]Some traditions take a long time to come back. Byzantium where unics run the whole government. Constantinople is the place where the unic reaches his apex of administrative respectability. The Byzantine court working with a thousand years of Roman bureaucracy and the entire Persian and Assyrian template simply admits the unic into the senior civil service and does not look back. A Byzantine document from the early 10th century called the Cleaterian of Felius lists 60 grades of court rank. About 50 of them are open to Unix. Unix holds some of the most powerful titles in the empire. Prepositus, Parakoy Momenos, Chamberlain, Eparch. This is also where the unic becomes a battlefield commander on a massive scale. The greatest example is Narsis, an Armenian-B born unic who started as a humble cubicular in the bedroom service of Justinian I, and ended as the conqueror of Italy. In 532, during the Nika riots, he walked through the crowd in the Hippodrome with a bag of gold, bought off the leaders of one faction, and let the rebellion split itself in half. 20,000 riers died and Justinian kept his throne all because the most dangerous man in the city was a small bald administrator with a lot of cash. In 552 in his 70s, Narcis led a Byzantine army across the Po Valley, smashed the Ostrogothic king Totila at Tagane and 18 months later wrapped up the longest war of the sixth century by killing Totila's successor Teas at Monzactarius. He governed Italy for the next 13 years. Justinian died. The new emperor Justin II asked him to retire.

[00:17:34]He did. Sulky and history records that the Lombards invaded Italy because Narsis in his fury allegedly invited them. Whether or not the rumor is true, the empire he had reconquered started crumbling within a year of his retirement. He was by every account 95 years old. Byzantine theologians actually argued in serious treatises that Unix were closer to angels than other men since angels also did not marry or reproduce. The historian Theopilact compared them to the cherubim. There is a startling thing here. For 500 years, the empire that thought of itself as the heir of Rome and Christ ran on a class of unbearded administrators who would have caused riots in old Rome itself. Your life as a Byzantine unic can include high public office, ownership of vast estates, friendships with the empress, and occasional accusations of sorcery because somebody will always whisper that the man who runs the treasury must have made a deal. A quick audit of the brutal math across all these civilizations. Take a step back and look at the numbers because they are brutal and consistent. Castration killed somewhere between a quarter and a third of subjects in the better documented Chinese cases and probably more in less developed surgical traditions. Most empires used child slaves, war captives, or boys sold by destitute families because adult castration was even more lethal. The ones who survived were placed in positions of trust no biological son could ever hold. And the empires that did this collectively dominated world history for almost 3,000 years. Why does the same institution keep showing up? Three reasons. All unromantic. First, no inheritance, no dynasty risk. A unic cannot found a rival house, which is exactly why Filiteras's nephew got Pergamon. Second, social isolation. Cut off from family ties. Loyalty had to flow upward to the king. Third, haram security. The men in charge of the king<unk>s wives and concubines had to be men who could not father a competing heir because the political consequences of one slip would be unservivable. The price was paid by children. The vast majority of these unics were not adults volunteering for a strange career. They were boys, often poor, often slaves, often victims of war, who had a procedure performed on them that we would file as a war crime today. The system worked precisely because of how many people it broke first. So, how did it all end? Slowly, embarrassingly, the Byzantine unit class faded as the Communian aristocracy reasserted hereditary masculinity as the prestige template in the 11th century.

[00:19:56]The Persian and Arab successor states kept the institution alive in muted forms through the medieval period. The Ottoman court ran a parallel system into the early 20th century with chief black unics of the herum who held titles for life. Chinese imperial unix only stopped showing up in 1924. When the warlord Fangg Yu Shang formally evicted Pui, the last emperor from the forbidden city.

[00:20:17]Sun Yaoing, the lastQing Yunic, died in 1996. He was 94. He had outlived theQing dynasty by 84 years. His memoir was published 2 years before his death and it is frankly devastating. So your life as a unic in every ancient civilization is in the end the longest job in human history. 3,000 years 11 empires and a constant rotation through palace, treasury, harum, monastery, fleet and battlefield. You were trusted because you could not become a threat. You were used because you could not say no. You were occasionally exalted once or twice into something close to divinity because for thousands of years the people in power genuinely believed that the man without sons was the only man you could trust to keep the city alive. The next time someone tells you that history is the story of great kings. Remember that the man writing down the king's words was very often the only person in the room who would still have a job after the king died. He had outlived the last three. He would outlive this one. He was the bow box. He was the silkworm. He was the one of the head and nobody in three millennia of empire ever managed to do without