A knife and like 10 other dudes with knives.

A pillow.

Various inedible plant extracts.

>>48122453
If we are talking about -ancient- northern europe it would probanly either be an axe to the head, or a long knife to the guts, followed by shouting "the chietain is dead! Long live the chieftain!".

But in general assasination techniques didn't change much over the years. A good placed crossbow/bow shot. Knife or multiple knofes in the guts. Poison. Strangulation.

Also you have to drop the thought that "assasains" wear all black, or that thy are som sort fo brotherhood or something.

Historical hitmen were either people close to the target (like in ceasars or rasputins case) or simply random mercs and lowlifes to do the job.

>>48122551
>Historical hitmen were either people close to the target (like in ceasars or rasputins case) or simply random mercs and lowlifes to do the job.

Not sure you can say that all of them are like that. I'm pretty sure that even then there where professional hitmen of various places in various times.

Example: the ninja. Another is the actual Hashashin.

>>48122453
Axs most assasinations was 5-6 dudes jumping someone durning bath or sleep and choping them with ax, and then either fleeing to hungary or Novigrad.

>>48122983
>ninja
>ancient
Anon...

>>48122453
If you can visit the Palazo Ducale in Venecia, you are going to see all kinds of fun assassin tools in the armory. Too bad they didnt let us take pics.

>>48122983
This was pretty rare, actually.
You'll note that most examples of assassinations of important people, even in the ancient world, usually involve someone close to the target and/or involve the assassin getting caught and dying relatively soon after he kills them.

Ninja and Hashashin did NOT operate like media portrays them either.
The Hashashin used stealth, but actually were a fully armed military force like any other in the crusades, they just made usage of asymmetrical warfare because their numbers were inferior to their various enemies. They also actually assassinated relatively few people even during the height of their activities and instead more often relied on the threat of assassination and spywork to gain information they could leverage to make their military attacks more successful.

Ninja worked in an almost identical fashion. They weren't all highly skilled invisible killers, but instead were soldiers trained in unconventional warfare and guerrilla tactics. Notably the regions most famous for ninja groups tended to be heavily forested and mountainous and thus the horse archery and later cavalry charge and pike-and-shot tactics used by the conventional armies of the time weren't really effective in them. And since basically EVERY Feudal lord during the Civil War era had a ninja group at their command as far as we can tell it really means that what they all actually had was spies. Real shinobi groups just dressed like regular people and placed themselves close to the target and then listened and passed on information.

There actually WAS a sort of semi-elite killer type thing in ancient China though; during the warring states periods of China (basically before China was even China at all), to kill individual rulers sometimes they would highly train a single nobleman or warrior and then have him go to their enemies under flag of parlay or under peaceful pretexts and then have them basically draw weapons and kill right there.

>>48123089
Notably, the Chinse "cike" (means something like "killing/stabbing guest) was more or less automatically assumed to be killed and captured. The soldier that was trained only had to get close enough to kill the one guy and then he wasn't necessary anymore after all.

There's some belief that the entire reason there's this seemingly arbitrary rule of putting a certain number of paces of distance between you and the Huangdi (Emperor) or various other rulers is that they decided that the safest way to protect from these types of killers was just to make it more unlikely that they could reach their target before finally the bodyguards took him down by increasing the distance they had to cover, though I personally am not sure how valid this belief actually is. It might be a beneficial side-effect but there's all kinds of other social customs that account for this distance between important people and their underlings and guests too.

>>48123019
Wait... What does he mean by ancient ? Bronze age ancient ? It's a bit confusing since OP gave examples of medieval nations.

In that case I am pretty sure that even then there was professional Assassins. Just like there where professional mercs or spys.
I know the Spartens where trained in stealth and assassination.

>>48123145
Yeah but the whole "kill a person and vanish into the night" thing hasn't traditionally been a very effective method. People aren't one-man armies that can hack through a dozen guys. Chances are if you're in the room with your target and JUST two bodyguards then you're fucked; even if you're badass enough to beat 2 to 1 odds, the time it takes you to kill them is more then enough time to alert other guards and escape at which point you're fucked.
You can actually go LOOK UP real life killings of important people and most of the time the killer is caught and killed in real life.

But then, that's sort of the point.
When all you need is someone dead by any means and even getting someone placed close to them and spying isn't beneficial then you are basically taking a short and expedient route politically. None of these things require the assassin to actually live longer then the one thing he's there to do, namely kill a person.

The fact is, if you can get within spitting distance of a person in real life it isn't particularly HARD to kill them. You just need to not care about living afterwords because the difficult part is surviving the experience.

>>48123145
Also, the Spartan soldiers were trained in stealth because they needed scouts like any army and scouts need to be stealthy and quick to be useful scouts.

You guys are forgetting one of the oldest murder techniques (murder yea, not actual surgical assassination) known to man: fire.
Just make sure faggot is sleeping in his home at night and put fire to his house ez pz