Crushing by elephant

drawing.]] Crushing by elephant was a common sentence for those condemned to death throughout south and southeast Asia for over 4,000 years. The Romans and Carthaginians also used this method on occasion. For many centuries elephants were also used for military purposes, and death under the foot of an elephant was commonplace for deserters or prisoners as well as for military criminals. The English traveller Robert Knox, writing in 1681, described a Sri Lankan method of execution by elephant:

The King makes use of them for Executioners; they will run their Teeth through the body, and then taer [sic] it in pieces, and throw it limb from limb. They have sharp Iron with a socket with three edges, which they put on their Teeth at such times...
(An Historical Relation Of the Island Ceylon, Robert Knox, London, 1681)

\n described this exeution in Le Tour du Monde in 1868.]] During an expedition to central India in 1868, Mr. Louis Rousselet described the execution of a criminal by elephant. A sketch was made of the execution showing 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 the "Le Tour du Monde", the most widely circulated journal of travel and adventure in France. Occasionally, executions would be prolonged either by having the elephant drag the condemned through the streets before the execution (usually by a rope attached to the elephant's leg), or through the use of an elephant that was trained to crush limbs first, and then the chest, often with excruciating slowness. Most rajahs kept execution elephants for the purpose of death by crushing and the executions were often held in public to serve as a warning to any who might transgress. To that end, many of the execution elephants were especially huge, often weighing in excess of nine tons. The results were intended to be gruesome and, by all accounts, often were. Some rulers, in the long history of this form of execution, even condemned children to suffer it. Other Mughals also adopted this form of execution for their own entertainment. Emperor Jahangir also used to witness such deaths himself and ordered a huge number of criminals to be crushed by his elephants. In the 18th century the Marathas commonly used this method of execution. The Emperor Santaji Ghorpade (1764-1794) admitted to a weakness for this particular punishment and, for the slightest error, would order an offender to be crushed beneath the enormous feet of his royal elephant. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Muslim courts of law in South Asia commonly ordered their condemned to be crushed by elephants. Category:Death penalty Category:Wikipedia Featured Articles\nsimple:Crushing by elephant\n