Otzi The Iceman

I find history fascinating not just for what it does tell me but for what it doesn't. Take Otzi, the world's oldest 'cold case'. We know Otzi was murdered. In our terms, it makes him an 'innocent' victim, nobody deserves to be murdered, right?

I would argue that we don't know anything about the time he lived in. Maybe he was a hellraiser and their way of dealing with that was to kill. Maybe. This was way before the Jews came up with 'Thou shalt not kill'.

I'm just saying that we have no way to know whether Otzi was a good man or bad man, or whether those Judeo-Christian terms meant anything at all to the people who lived back then. Maybe Otzi was a magician and they feared him. Is that why they waited until they got him alone?

And speaking of alone, when does a man travel alone through this kind of terrain? Not trade, I would suppose because they'd have animals to carry their goods. Was he cast out? In a lot of tribes, the only people who are alone are those whom the tribe have disowned because they're bad.

On the other hand, Otzi was well dressed which might mean that he had some 'riches' of whatever that may have meant back then.

I know these are a lot of questions, but I think most authors ask questions like these, probably about everyone they think of. People on a plane when it flies over etc.

But for Otzi, it just makes him more fascinating as it makes the times he lived in more interesting. Will we ever know exactly what kind of society he came from, the rules and mores of the group? Probably not.

It's a great thing to think about and some author, somewhere, will surely write a fiction book about his life.