Execution by elephant
Execution by elephant, or Gunga Rao, was a method of
The sight of elephants executing captives was recorded in contemporary journals and accounts of life in Asia by European travellers. The practice was eventually suppressed by the European colonial powers that colonised the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. While primarily confined to Asia, the practice was occasionally used by European and African powers, such as Ancient Rome and Ancient Carthage, particularly to deal with mutinous soldiers.
Cultural aspects
Historically, the elephants were under the constant control of a driver or
The use of elephants in such fashion went beyond the common royal power to dispense life and death. Elephants have long been used as symbols of royal authority (and still are in some places, such as
Geographical scope
Asian powers
Southeast Asia
Elephants were used for execution in
For Treason and Murder, the Elephant is the Executioner. The condemned Person is made fast to a Stake driven into the Ground for the Purpose, and the Elephant is brought to view him, and goes twice or thrice round him, and when the Elephant's Keeper speaks to the monstrous Executioner, he twines his Trunk round the Person and Stake, and pulling the Stake from the Ground with great Violence, tosses the Man and the Stake into the Air, and in coming down, receives him on his Teeth, and making him off again, puts one of his fore Feet on the Carcase, and squeezes it flat.
The journal of John Crawfurd records another method of execution by elephant in the kingdom of Cochinchina (modern south Vietnam), where he served as a British envoy in 1821. Crawfurd recalls an event where "the criminal is tied to a stake, and [Excellency's favourite] elephant runs down upon him and crushes him to death."[8]
The use of elephants for execution was reported in Aceh by a French merchant, François Martin. Under the rule of Sultan Alauddin Ri'ayat Syah Sayyid al-Mukammal, an adulterous couple was thrown to the elephant and stomped to death.[9]
South Asia
India
Hindu and Muslim rulers in India executed tax evaders, rebels and enemy soldiers alike "under the feet of elephants".
During the
Upon a certain day, when I myself was present, some men were brought out who had been accused of having attempted the life of the Vizier. They were ordered, accordingly, to be thrown to the elephants, which had been taught to cut their victims to pieces. Their hoofs were cased with sharp iron instruments, and the extremities of these were like knives. On such occasions the elephant-driver rode upon them: and, when a man was thrown to them, they would wrap the trunk about him and toss him up, then take him with the teeth and throw him between their fore feet upon the breast, and do just as the driver should bid them, and according to the orders of the Emperor. If the order was to cut him to pieces, the elephant would do so with his irons, and then throw the pieces among the assembled multitude: but if the order was to leave him, he would be left lying before the Emperor, until the skin should be taken off, and stuffed with hay, and the flesh given to the dogs.
Other Indian polities also carried out executions by elephant. The
The early-19th-century writer Robert Kerr relates how the king of Goa "keeps certain elephants for the execution of malefactors. When one of these is brought forth to dispatch a criminal, if his keeper desires that the offender be destroyed speedily, this vast creature will instantly crush him to atoms under his foot; but if desired to torture him, will break his limbs successively, as men are broken on the wheel."[18] The naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon cited this flexibility of purpose as evidence that elephants were capable of "human reasoning, [rather] than a simple, natural instinct".[19]
Such executions were often held in public as a warning to any who may transgress. To that end, many of the elephants were especially large, often weighing in excess of nine tons. The executions were intended to be, and often were, gruesome. They were sometimes preceded by torture publicly inflicted by the same elephant used for the execution. An account of one such torture-and-execution at
The man was a slave, and two days before had murdered his master, brother to a native chieftain, called Ameer Sahib. About eleven o'clock the elephant was brought out, with only the driver on his back, surrounded by natives with bamboos in their hands. The criminal was placed three yards behind on the ground, his legs tied by three ropes, which were fastened to a ring on the right hind leg of the animal. At every step the elephant took, it jerked him forward, and every eight or ten steps must have dislocated another limb, for they were loose and broken when the elephant had proceeded five hundred yards. The man, though covered in mud, showed every sign of life, and seemed to be in the most excruciating torments. After having been tortured in this manner for about an hour, he was taken to the outside of the town, when the elephant, which is instructed for such purposes, was backed, and put his foot on the head of the criminal.[20]
The use of elephants as executioners continued well into the latter half of the 19th century. During an expedition to central India in 1868, Louis Rousselet described the execution of a criminal by an elephant. A sketch depicting the execution showed the condemned being forced to place his head upon a pedestal, and then being held there while an elephant crushed his head underfoot. The sketch was made into a woodcut and printed in "Le Tour du Monde", a widely circulated French journal of travel and adventure, as well as foreign journals such as Harper's Weekly.[21]
The growing power of the British Empire led to the decline and eventual end of elephant executions in India. Writing in 1914, Eleanor Maddock noted that in Kashmir, since the arrival of Europeans, "many of the old customs are disappearing – and one of these is the dreadful custom of the execution of criminals by an elephant trained for the purpose and which was known by the hereditary name of 'Gunga Rao'."[22]
Sri Lanka
Elephants were widely used across the Indian subcontinent and South Asia as a method of execution. The English sailor Robert Knox, writing in 1681, described a method of execution by elephant which he had witnessed while being held captive in Sri Lanka. Knox says the elephants he witnessed had their tusks fitted with "sharp Iron with a socket with three edges". After impaling the victim's body with its tusks, the elephant would "then tear it in pieces, and throw it limb from limb".[23]
The 19th-century traveler James Emerson Tennent comments that "a Kandyan [Sri Lankan] chief, who was witness to such scenes, has assured us that the elephant never once applied his tusks, but, placing his foot on the prostrate victim, plucked off his limbs in succession by a sudden movement of his trunk."[24] Knox's book depicts exactly this method of execution in a famous drawing, An Execution by an Eliphant.
Writing in 1850, the British diplomat
During the native dynasty it was the practice to train elephants to put criminals to death by trampling upon them, the creatures being taught to prolong the agony of the wretched sufferers by crushing the limbs, avoiding the vital parts. With the last tyrant king of Candy, this was a favourite mode of execution and as one of the elephant executioners was at the former capital during our sojourn there we were particularly anxious to test the creature's sagacity and memory. The animal was mottled and of enormous size, and was quietly standing there with his keeper seated upon his neck; the noble who accompanied us desired the man to dismount and stand on one side. The chief then gave the word of command, ordering the creature to 'slay the wretch!' The elephant raised his trunk, and twined it, as if around a human being; the creature then made motions as if he were depositing the man on the earth before him, then slowly raised his back foot, placing it alternately upon the spots where the limbs of the sufferer would have been. This he continued to do for some minutes; then, as if satisfied that the bones must be crushed, the elephant raised his trunk high upon his head and stood motionless; the chief then ordered him to 'complete his work,' and the creature immediately placed one foot, as if upon the man's abdomen, and the other upon his head, apparently using his entire strength to crush and terminate the wretch's misery.
West Asia
During the
The practice appears to have been adopted in parts of the Muslim Middle East.
At Nineveh there was an elephant. Its head is not protruding. It is big, eats about two wagon loads of straw at once; its mouth is in its breast, and when it wants to eat it protrudes its lip about two cubits, takes up the straw with it, and puts it in its mouth. When the sultan condemns anyone to death, they say to the elephant, "this person is guilty." It then seizes him with its lip, casts him aloft and slays him.
Europe
Perdiccas saw that they [the mutineers] were paralyzed and at his mercy. He withdrew from the main body some 300 men who had followed Meleager at the time when he burst from the first meeting held after Alexander's death, and before the eyes of the entire army he threw them to the elephants. All were trampled to death beneath the feet of the beasts...
Similarly, the Roman writer
Africa
In 240 BC, a
There are fewer records of elephants being used as straightforward executioners for the civil population. One such example is mentioned by
References
- ^ ISBN 978-0812201079.
- ^ ISBN 9781861891853.
- ^ Norman Chevers (1856). A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for Bengal and the North-western Provinces. Carbery. pp. 260–261.
- ISBN 978-0-300-03921-4.
- ^ Schafer, Edward H. "The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics". University of California Press, 1985. p. 80. ASIN: B0000CLTET
- ISBN 978-0-300-03921-4.
- ^ Hamilton, Alexander (1727). A new account of the East Indies. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: John Mosman. pp. 181–182.
- ^ Crawfurd, John. "Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-general of India to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China". H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1830. p. 419.
- ^ Hanggoro, Hendaru Tri (7 March 2012). "Hukuman Kejam dari Sultan". historia.id. Historia. Retrieved 1 April 2023.
- ISBN 978-0-19-280271-2.
- ^ Jack Weatherford-Genghis Khan, p.116
- ^ Natesan, G.A. The Indian Review, p. 160
- ^ Hamilton, p. 170.
- ^ Eraly, p. 45.
- ^ Battuta, "The travels of Ibn Battuta", transl. Lee, S, London 1829, pp. 146-47
- ^ Eraly, p. 479.
- ^ Eraly, p. 498
- ^ Kerr, p. 395.
- ^ Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc. "Natural history of man, the globe, and of quadrupeds". vol. 1. Leavitt & Allen, 1857. p. 113.
- ^ Ryley Scott, George. "The Percy Anecdotes vol. VIII". The History of Torture Throughout the Ages. Torchstream Books, 1940. pp. 116–7.
- ^ Harper's Weekly, February 3, 1872
- ^ Maddock, Eleanor. "What the Crystal Revealed". American Theosophist Magazine, April to September 1914. p. 859.
- ^ Knox, Robert. "An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon". London, 1681.
- ^ Tennent, p. 281.
- ^ Sirr, Sir Charles Henry, quoted in Barrow, George. "Ceylon: Past and Present". John Murray, 1857. pp. 135–6.
- ^ Benisch, A. (trans). "Travels of Petachia of Ratisbon". London, 1856.
- ^ Nasuh, Matrakci (1588). "Execution of Prisoners, Belgrade". Süleymanname, Topkapi Sarai Museum, Ms Hazine 1517.
- ISBN 0-14-008878-4
- ^ Quintus Curtius Rufus. Historia Alexandri Magni Liber X (in Latin) – via Wikisource.
- ^ "Curt. 10.6-10". Archived from the original on January 3, 2006.
- ^ Futrell, Alison (Quoted by) (ed.). "A Sourcebook on the Roman Games". Blackwell Publishing, 2006. p. 8.
- ^ Miles 2011, p. 210.
- ^ Goldsworthy 2006, p. 135.
- ^ Miles 2011, p. 208.
- ^ Eckstein 2017, p. 7.
- ^ a b c Collins, p. 122.
- ^ 3 Maccabees 5
- ^ 3 Maccabees 6
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- Chevers, Norman. "A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for Bengal and the Northwestern Provinces". Carbery, 1856.
- Collins, John Joseph. "Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora". Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, October 1999. ISBN 0-8028-4372-7
- Eckstein, Arthur (2017). "The First Punic War and After, 264-237BC". The Encyclopedia of Ancient Battles. Wiley Online Library. pp. 1–14. ISBN 9781405186452.
- Eraly, Abraham. "Mughal Throne: The Saga of India's Great Emperors", Phoenix House, 2005. ISBN 0-7538-1758-6
- ISBN 978-0-304-36642-2.
- Hamilton, Alexander. "A New Account of the East Indies: Being the Observations and Remarks of Capt. Alexander Hamilton, from the Year 1688 to 1723". C. Hitch and A. Millar, 1744.
- Kerr, Robert. "A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels". W. Blackwood, 1811.
- Lee, Samuel (trans). "The Travels of Ibn Batuta". Oriental Translation Committee, 1829.
- ISBN 978-0-141-01809-6.
- Olivelle, Patrick (trans). "The Law Code of Manu". Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-19-280271-2
- Schimmel, Annemarie. "The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture". Reaktion Books, February 2004. ISBN 1-86189-185-7
- Tennent, Emerson James. "Ceylon: An Account of the Island Physical, Historical and Topographical". Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860.