Context: Modern historians debate and argue over historical events. Meanwhile the sage Vyasa dictating the Mahabharata to Lord Ganesha, showing that ancient historians simply recorded massive, made-up casualty counts - something shared across the globe.
Part of it is that many pre-modern armies also had extremely limited ability to estimate the numbers of their enemies, as they often lacked professional scouting units who specialize in such matters - even some early modern ‘rationalized’ attempts at scouting with collations of multiple scouts’ record-keeping and long-distance observation tools like binoculars, like the Pinkertons in the US Civil War, could come up with double or triple the actual numbers of the enemy.
On the other hand, Procopius, a Late Roman/Byzantine writer, accuses Emperor Justinian of killing a trillion people (‘a myriad myriad of myriads’ - ‘10,000 * 10,000 * 10,000’), and 50 million in Libya alone. So uh, there’s definitely a taste for big numbers with some pre-modern writers.
Guy kinda sounds like a dick
I mean, Procopius also wrote that Justinian walked around with his head detached from his body in that same text, so it may not be the most accurate of sources.
(even speaking as someone who fucking hates Justinian)
Massive dick
How would YOU know, you weren’t there to see for yourself. Dude was probably a Dullahan.
Also the Buddha had lived for trillion times the theoretical age of our universe (big bang to heat death) before reaching enlightenment