Just read an interesting — if grisly — article in Der Speigel on torture in the ancient world (“The Worst Ways to Die“). It’s a catalog of all the various punishments and execution methods from the usual suspects: Romans, Assyrians, and the like. For example, the Assyrian kings used a technique known as ‘staking.’
“Staking involved the executioner hammering a stake through the victim’s lubricated anus. The goal was to place the rounded, wooden stake so carefully that it only just pushed the internal organs aside. Many victims lived for days skewered like this.”
Yikes. But the real winners are the Persians. I don’t know what it is, but the Persians…they got creative. Seriously. They make the “Saw” movies seem like “Bedtime with Elmo.”
“And the punishment of “sitting in the tub” saw the convicted person placed in a wooden tub with only their head sticking out. The executioner would then paint the victim’s face with milk and honey. Flies would begin to swarm around the victim’s nose and eyelids. The victim was also fed regularly and fairly soon, they would virtually be swimming in their own excrement.
At which stage maggots and worms would devour their body. One victim apparently survived for 17 days — he decayed alive.”
And that’s not even getting into the models of “Hell justice” seen in Daoist temples around China…or Dick Cheney’s secret underground lair.
Another reason not to visit Ancient Persia…or really anywhere else in the ancient world: Just read an inte.. http://tinyurl.com/qotafx
The death of a thousand cuts (really not a thousand, it was only hundreds) in China was discontinued in the 18th century.
It involves stripping the convict. Tie up the convict tightly with a net so that flesh stuck out through the netting. The executioner than cut two pieces of muscle from the fleshiest part of the body to cover the eyes of the convict. Then cuts are made in various parts of the body,carefully so that the convict remained alive and, preferably, conscious, and only died when the last cut, right through the heart.
Yep, these are my readers.*
(*once again shamelessly ripping off some writer named ‘Simmons.’)
I will have to study up a bit more on ancient Chinese etiquette and customs before taking my trip to early imperial China (especially on “how not to p*ss off the monarch or the imperial consort & their families”).
Anyone have spare tickets? I’ll definitely take either the Han or the Tang, and will consider the Northern or Southern Dynasties during any period in which anti-foreign pogroms were not being carried out…