And very very importantly, this is taking the death ages of kings (i.e. people who lived long enough to actually become monarchs) compared to life expectancy at birth (i.e. people who lived long enough to be born).
Given that until roughly the 1700s infant mortality was brutal (according to [1] fully 50% of children died before reaching adulthood), this comparison becomes even starker, since average life expectancy of a crown prince at birth would be far lower (somewhere in their 20s).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
Given their position, kings and other members of a warrior elite generally would likely have downwards pressure on their life expectancy from that.
how much of that early eeath was poison or in war?
This "average life expectancy in the ancient world" thing is nothing more than an illustration of when to pick the median over the mean because the data is skewed by outliers.
Re:The Daily Life of a Medieval King
by naniwaduni on Monday July 21, 2025 @11:48AM
(#44636613)
Quite the opposite in this case—the median is single-digit; adults are the outliers.
Except kings very frequently died for "good" reasons: being killed in battle, or by political opponents, or during hunting accidents, or victims of coups, or beheaded. As a leader, you lead your subjects into all kinds of battles and take all kinds of risks and today's politicians don't do that anymore.
> For England, including the Kings of Wessex from Æthelberht on (the first I could find a birthdate for), and the Kings of England up to Edward IV, whose reigns extends to 1483 (and consequently into Modern Ages, if we take the usual date of 1453 - the fall of Constantinople - as the end of the Middle Ages), I found the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years. (http://ideias.wikidot.com/reis-da-inglaterra-na-idade-media)
Life expectancy is longer than that in even the poorest countries today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...