8 Brutal Execution Methods from Ancient Times
The waist chop, slow slicing, being thrown to the beasts, and more. Today, we're traveling back in time to check out 8 of the most brutal execution methods from ancient times
TW: Suicide, torture
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SOURCES
https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/death-penalty-classical-athens/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Eustace
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/gladiators-0010300
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqsqjsg/revision/2l
https://www.realmofhistory.com/2017/06/06/poena-cullei-roman-punishment-parricide/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/history-of-the-death-penalty/
https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-most-brutal-methods-of-execution-from-the-ancient-world
https://statesofincarceration.org/story/gallows-chair
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/methods-of-execution/authorized-methods-by-state
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Phalaris
https://www.history.co.uk/articles/that-takes-guts-7-gory-execution-methods-from-tudor-england
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi#Qing_dynasty
https://www.historyhit.com/gruesome-medieval-torture-methods/
https://www.historyonthenet.com/medieval-life-crime-and-medieval-punishment
https://books.google.com/books?id=TnqLow3iKd4C&pg=PA11&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Harrison_(soldier)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqsqjsg/revision/4
https://englishmonarchs.co.uk/dafydd_grufydd.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Niers
https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/middle-ages
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
Gather round my darkly curious friends, because today we are taking quite the dark journey. Capital punishment has come up quite a few times in Heart Starts Pounding episodes. In the episode about Harvard’s dirty secrets, the professor who killed the businessman on campus was hanged for his crimes, and the upper echelon of Boston all got handwritten invitations to witness his execution. In the episode about the Blount family bombings, the suspect tried to sell tickets to his own execution on Ebay, only for the sale to be shut down and his sentence commuted. And in the ritualistic human sacrifice episode well, people were sentenced to be ritually sacrificed. Whether obvious or not, it’s been somewhat of a running theme.
So I wanted to take some time today, to look back on 8 different methods of execution from the Ancient world. We’ll hear about slow slicing, hemlock poisoning, the brazen bull, and more. I will say, there were some things in the research for this episode that surprised and horrified me, you may learn a few interesting things you didn’t know before in this one.
Before we get started- Have you listened to this month’s bonus episode on the strange experiences people have had while in Comas? This month our Rogue detecting society on patreon submitted different ideas for the bonus episode, and our High Council tier voted. And this episode was WILD to do, You’ll definitely want to check it out, you can listen on Patreon and on Apple podcast subscriptions.
And I don’t know if you’ve been following the news at all, but there have been some developments in the death penalty here in America. A man was just put to death using Nitrogen, south carolina wants to use the electric chair again, and more and more states are trying to get death by firing squad put back on the capital punishment menu. It’s a strange time indeed, and I’ll be talking about it more with my producer, Matt Brown, in this weeks episode of footnotes. You can check that out on Patreon, there’s a link in the shownotes to sign up.
Ok, We’re going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’re going to take a trip back to Ancient China and hear about something called the Five Punishments, a form a torture that I don’t think anyone would even wish upon their own enemies.
Our first story starts more than 2000 years ago, during a warring period of China’s history in the Qin dynasty. At that point , China had been using a brutal form of punishment known as the 5 punishments for 2000 years, and to fully understand how bad it was, we can look to a man named Li Si.
Li Si is considered one of the most important figures in Chinese history, but he’s also known as one of the most brutal. He served as Chancellor under two different rulers from 246 - 208 BC, and as chancellor, he feared the spread of knowledge amongst civilians that could fight against the Qin dynasty. To combat this, he advocated for book burning and convinced the emperor to have scholars in other states killed. Li si thought that anyone who discussed banned texts or used history to criticize the present should be put to death. Most of the history records and literature, as well as important confucian texts of the time were destroyed because of him.
One day, confucian scholars banded together to protest the book burning. It was a last ditch effort to save their culture and history. Li Si looked out of his window to see men in monk garments cursing his name and taking to the street. He didn’t take kindly to those who spoke ill of him.
It’s said that Li Si responded by having a giant pit dug on the outskirts of the city. Each of the confucian scholars was sentenced to be thrown into it, and buried alive while a pile of their books burned beside them. Their screams could be heard coming from under the dirt where they were buried until one by one, they all went silent.
But Li Si wouldn’t have power forever. Eventually he was betrayed by one of his closest confidants, and he was sentenced to death for treason. The manner would be something fitting for a man who ordered the executions of hundreds, maybe even thousands. He would suffer the five punishments.
The 5 punishments were 5 different types of cruel and unusual punishments for different types of crimes. Sometimes they mixed and matched, and sometimes, like in the case of Li Si, someone was sentenced to suffer all 5. 5 was regarded as the most mysterious and powerful number, so it was important that there be 5 distinct types of punishment. They were
Mo (muah): Tattooing of criminal’s face or other visible parts. The tattoos were usually words to describe misdemeanors. People became forever marked by their petty crimes.
The next one was quite the jump from a tattoo. It was Yi (yee): or cutting off the offenders nose
Next was Yue (you-eh): foot amputation. Whichever foot was removed signaled the severity of the crime. right foot for serious crimes, left for lighter offenses. We know about this punishment because In 1999, Chinese archaeologists unearthed female skeleton with right foot missing - victim of yue - The missing right foot meant she was serious crime offender - but archaeologists could also tell that she lived fiveish years after the amputation suggesting she was cared for after, and that the punishment was not intended to cause death.
Next was Gong (gong): Castration. For men, it was exactly what you’re thinking, but for women this sometimes meant pounding the abdomen with a stick to attempt to damage the womb. This punishment was typically used for infidelity and promiscuity.
And then the last one was Dah-Pee, Death. This punishment took a few different and creative forms. strangulation, decapitation, boiling alive, tying each limb to a different horse and ripping the body apart amongst others
One by one, Li Si suffered through each punishment. His nose was carved off, then his legs, next he was castrated, all without any form of anesthetic.
Finally, Li Si was given his final form of punishment, which brings us to our first form of execution: the waist chop. This was to occur in the public market place for all to see.
Waist chop was the act of cutting someone in half in a way that maximized the amount of time it would take for them to die from the wound. The accused would be cut in half at the waist, below any important organs, resulting in a slower and more painful death. There was no regard for cruel or unusual at this time, actually the more cruel and unusual, the better.
And this form of punishment was used for longer than you would imagine. There’s a legend of a man named Yu Hongtu who was executed by waist chop. It’s said that he was able to write out the chinese character for Cruel in his own blood seven times before dying. It was after this that the Waist chop was retired as a form of capital punishment. That was only in 1734
Next, as was sometimes common in ancient China, Li Si’s entire family was rounded up. Everyone, brothers, their wives, parents, cousins, anyone with any relation to Li Si watched as officials came to their doors and dragged them from their homes into a public square. They were to be executed as well, by a decree known as nine familial exterminations. This meant that anyone related to Li Si by 9 degrees would be executed. Their method of capital punishment? Well that brings us to our second method. Something known as Slow Slicing, or death by a thousand cuts.
This was when the subject would have small pieces of their body cut off of them until they died. It could take up to 3,000 cuts if they were small enough, if the knife went layer by layer through your skin, then your tendons and muscles, down to the bone. This would take days to complete.
So each of Li Si’s family members had small parts of their body slowly sliced off until they eventually died.
That’s a fun fact for you, when people use the phrase Death By A Thousand Cuts or, I don’t know, sing it, they’re referencing an ancient chinese execution method. How morbid.
Familial exterminations, by the way, didn’t always end at just 9 degrees. The most egregious form of familial exterminations was done to a man named Fang Xiaoru, who was sentenced to die by slow slicing in 1402.
Fang was sentenced to death, as well as extermination of ten degrees of kinship. This meant that 10 groups of people with connections to Fang were to be executed via slow slicing. The groups were, Fangs grandparents, his children over a certain age and their spouses, any grandchildren he had over a certain age and their spouses, his siblings and their spouses, his aunts and uncles, his first, second and third cousins, his spouse, and then all of his pupils. It’s estimated that 873 people were sliced up over a thousand times because of Fang’s treason.
It might be worth noting here WHY some of these punishments were so brutal. It wasn’t just violence for violence sake, it was violence so one day china could know peace. China was in a time known as the warring period and there had been brutal battles for 200 years between the different warring kingdoms. There had never been one 'China'--a united nation of China. to some extent the brutality was justified to create peace. there was a real fear of slipping back into an endless war. Does it really justify it? But this was at least how they TRIED to justify it. Unifying China and maintaining that unity was more important than anything else.
This kind of brutal punishment did fall out of favor over time however. And we have evidence that the first time corporal punishment was outlawed was due to an unlikely hero who arose about 30 years after Li Si’s death. A teen girl.
About 30 years after Li Si’s death, Emperor Wen decided that corporal punishments were too harsh. He changed out tattooing and cutting off the nose for more mild hard labor and flogging. And the reason he rid the empire of corporal punishment? A young girl.
Chunyu Yi was devastated in 176 BC when her father was accused of medical malpractice. He was a famous doctor in the area, and because of that, he was busy and highly sought after. He didn’t have time to treat every family in the community, which resulted in some angry residents accusing him of neglect and malpractice. As a result, he was sentenced to prison where he had to await the ruling on which of the 5 punishments he would suffer
This caused his 5 daughters much distress, especially Chunyu Yi. She saw how much good her father had done for the community, and she wrote a passionate letter to Emperor Wen, begging him to not take her fathers hand or foot. She even offered to be sentenced to hard labor so that her father could go free.
Emperor wen was already not a huge fan of corporal punishment. They permanently marked people for one wrongdoing, and so many people died from them, it was almost as if every crime carried a death sentence. This letter was his last straw, he did away with them. He also changed cruel death sentences like being ripped apart by horses to hangings or beheadings, which he found to be less cruel while still being effective.
The change in less harsh punishments was said to revitalize the population and bring about a period of great productivity. Turns out when people don’t constantly fear being cut into a million pieces, they have the brain space to come up with cool ideas.
We’re going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we’ll explore some of ancient Greece’s forms of execution.
Outside of Jesus Christ, the execution of the philosopher Socrates is probably the most talked about execution from the old world.
In 399 BC, it was decided that Socrates’ ideas were corrupting society, and that he should be sentenced to die. And this is our third form of execution we’ll explore.
Famously, Socrates drank the poisonous hemlock while he was surrounded by his friends, but you may be surprised to learn Hemlock was not often given as a sentence to people in ancient Greece. No, people drank hemlock when they wanted to die BEFORE their execution date, when they wanted to forgo worse forms of execution for something a little less painful.
Hemlock is officially described as a biennial, herbaceous plant that can grow from 3 to 5 feet tall. But really it looks like a tall, vertical growing fern covered in small white flowers. The stem is sometimes splotched with purple and red, hinting at its poisonous nature. Every part of the plant is poisonous, the stems, the seeds, the roots. And if ingested, it will disrupt your central nervous system in a way that makes you stop breathing. That wont happen right away though, at first, you’ll just feel drunk, maybe you’ll even enjoy the feeling, so you’ll take a little more. But sometime within the next three days, your body will go numb, you’ll become paralyzed, and then you’ll take your last breath.
Legend has it that hemlock grew at the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, and when his blood dripped down onto the plant, it turned it toxic for the rest of eternity.
The ancient greeks figured out how to turn it into a tea, but it was so expensive only the wealthy could afford it.
So Socrates, who was famous for saying things like, He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature, got his rich friends to buy him Hemlock, and then invited them to his prison chamber to sit with him while he drank it.
Slowly, the poison took over his body, but he was lucid throughout the poisoning and able to describe it to his friends. First it caused numbness in his limbs, and he lost use of them. The poison slowly crept towards his heart, paralyzing it as well. It’s not particularly painful, and it’s been said that Socrates' last words were a reminder to one of his friends to repay a debt that he had. He was just thinking outloud.
In the ancient world, where people were dying of horrible diseases and infections all the time, where wars were brutal and often, drinking hemlock was a relatively chill way to die. but that’s not what the Athenians typically chose.
That leads me to our fourth way. One of the most common forms of the death penalty was death by tympanon. A Tympanon was a club shaped board. There’s two ways this style of execution could have gone. One is that a person was simply beaten to death with the club, and the other was more similar to crucifixion, a method popular in ancient Rome. This version saw a person attached to the board by their hands and feet and then left outside in the elements until they died of thirst.
Another form of execution popular at the time was simply throwing someone down a large chasm to their death. This method was easy, fast, and cheap, you didn’t even have to buy a board to attach someone too, the Greeks loved it.
It seems though eventually there was a little moral panic about how painful this form of death was, because it’s been suggested that the person would be killed first and then thrown down the chasm, though I can’t imagine that was any better. Both methods are hypothesized to have ended around the 4th century BC.
There’s a reason these types of executions don’t seem as brutal as those in Ancient China. the Greeks thought that killing a person, under any circumstance, caused religious pollution. An executioner just doing their job would be tainted by the act of the execution. They’d rather someone die of exposure, drink hemlock themselves, or simply be exiled rather than risk polluting themselves.
Capital punishment in Ancient Greece took a few different forms, but around this time, it was common- if not expected- that those on death row would escape into exile and live the rest of their days separated from the community. It was actually really common to just let prisoners escape so they didn’t have to deal with killing them.
But that wasn’t the case for Phalris, the 6th century Greek tyrant who implemented a form of death so depraved it feels like a myth.
Phalaris’s execution manner of choice was something known as a Brazen Bull. Maybe you’ve heard of it, though you definitely haven’t seen an original. None remain. All we have are drawings of what it could have looked like.
During his reign, Phalaris had a sculptor make him a life sized bronze bull statue that had a small door on its side, big enough for a person to get in and out of. He would then have an enemy shoved inside the hollow bull through the door, and an exocutioner would light a fire underneath the bull, heating up the bronze and basically turning the inside of the statue into an oven. Apparently, the acoustics of the bull made it so the screams coming from the person cooking inside sounded just like a bull mooing wildly.
this was maybe another case of a creator being killed by their own invention. As the legend goes, Phalaris was eventually overthrown by Telemachus, who ordered him to be cooked inside of his own Brazen Bull.
The legend also says that this method made its way all the way to Ancient Rome. Sait Eustace is said to have been forced into the Brazen bull with his wife and children after his first form of execution failed. Emperor Hadrian was said to have thrown Eustace and his family to a pack of lions when Eustace refused to make a sacrifice to Pagan gods, but the Lions bowed at the family’s feet. So instead he was slow roasted inside of the Bull.
The Romans were no stranger to cruel and unusual punishments. They didn’t believe killing led to moral pollution, in fact, they believed public executions made people behave better.
And just like how no Brazen bulls have survived into today’s world, one of the most infamous forms of execution in Ancient Rome has no physical evidence of it’ existence either. We’re just left with writings, illustrations, and our own imaginations to understand how gruesome it was.
It was known as Poena Cullei, which translates roughly to Penalty of the Sack. It was a punishment reserved for those who killed their parents or close family members. Though that type of crime was rare, it was judged especially harshly. Killing someone who gave you life was proof of social corruption. It was said that the blood of the person who killed a parent was so tainted that it would make any animal who feasted upon their corpse even more savage.
There was a ritual associated with executing these kinds of criminals. First, a wolf skin bag was tied over the offender’s head, and they were publicly whipped with red rods. Next, wooden clogs would be placed on their feet and they were shoved into a Cullei, or large sack. Live animals were then thrown in the sack with them, snakes when they were available, and sometimes chickens, cats, monkeys and dogs.
The offender was then carted to a running stream and the sack was thrown in. Usually the sack was tied so tight that the person didn’t die from drowning, they’d die from asphyxiation, much longer after they would have died from drowning.
Or, at least that was the plan. There were stories of the bag breaking and everyone inside spilling out into the river. When that happened the people would be captured and killed in another way, and the animals would be let free.
This method of execution was outlawed in the 9th century, however, it did make a comeback in Medieval Germany because, you know, the medieval times.
More, after the break
Our final form of execution you may be familiar with. Though it occurred thousands of years ago, it’s remained in the cultural zeitgeist, most likely for its brutality. Here, imagine this
You’re sitting in a 250,000 seat arena in Ancient Rome. It’s a beautiful, sunny day, and a huge portion of the city is in this arena with you, cheering and shouting. Everyone you know is here to watch the gladiator games, the superbowl sunday of ancient roman times.
You’ve just finished watching the chariot races, a relatively family friendly race where two chariots pulled by horses race around the arena to see who is faster.
But now, it’s half time, and the mood starts changing. The arena is cleared of the chariots, and a door off to the side opens. A group of terrified, barely dressed men and women exit out into the screaming arena and the crowd goes wild. Not with excitement, but with bloodlust.
These men and women have been rounded up by roman officials, they’re a mix of captured soldiers, criminals, and other types of offenders. And they’ve all been sentenced to die for your entertainment.
Just as they all file into the arena a trap door opens, and you watch as all of the people below cower. They can see what’s under the door, but you cant make out what it is through the shadows. The crowd gets quiet in anticipation.
And then, slowly, a form materializes in the doorway. It’s big, hulking, and….furry. A lion emerges followed by three more, and the crowd goes wild again. The lions look sluggish and tired at first, they’ve been crammed in cages for some time and they need to stretch and adjust to the sunlight. Also, they haven’t eaten in days. They’ve been intentionally deprived of food for this moment.
The prisoners and soldiers below all turn and run back towards the door. They know what’s coming. In fact, some of them were instructed by lion tamers how to behave so the lions would eat them quickly and their deaths wouldn’t be slow and prolonged. The prisoners have no weapons, no way to fight back. These lions have been fed a diet of human flesh since they’ve been captured, specifically to prepare them for these executions. They’re ready to eat these people. And all at once, the lions pounce on the prisoners, devouring them bit by bit. For some, it’s a quick death, for others, the lions take their time. But no one survives this massacre.
The worst part is, the crowd loves it. This public display of punishment has now become part of the games for them, and they expect it. And as with anything, over time they grow bored with the same ritual. So the game masters start inventing new ways for the animals to kill the prisoners.
New ways to have animals eat prisoners included the following: structures were built in the arena to give prisoners a place to escape to. They could climb up a platform out of the way of the animals, giving them hope that they were out of harm's way. Only for the structure to collapse right as the hungry pack of lions surrounded it.
They would sometimes train the animals to reenact death scenes from famous myths and legends. This included spending months teaching an eagle how to properly remove a man's organs while he writhed on the ground.
Betting was also highly encouraged. Sometimes prisoners were wheeled out into the arena attached to various objects, sometimes tied to a wheel, sometimes nailed to a board, and viewers could place bets on who would be devoured first.
The deaths were so horrible and violent that prisoners often looked for ways to end the suffering before they had to go out. One man shoved a bathroom sponge down his throat right before he was set to face the lions, suffocating himself. Another man who was being carried into the arena on a cart because he refused to walk in, stuck his head in between the spokes of the cart's wheels to snap his neck. His death was far faster than what awaited him.
Ultimately, the increasingly violent nature of being thrown to the beasts was what lead to the games’ abolition. By the end, Romans were throwing many christians into the arena as a way to discourage people from following the religion. However, this only empowered those across the empire to join. Rumors of christians surviving attacks, of lions bowing at the feet of believers spread far and wide, and only showed those who had converted what the power of Christianity could do.
When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, many of the christians who braved them were considered martyrs, and the games were swiftly banned,
Researching this episode, i couldn’t help but feel like if I were alive in the ancient world, I would have been on my best behavior, just out of fear that someone would throw me to a pack of lions or slowly slice off pieces of my flesh until I died. You could have told me to do literally anything and I would have done it as to not die a horribly painful death.
But I want to add one final fact to this episode.
I intentionally said that the Brazen Bull was so brutal that it almost didn’t sound real. That’s because it’s highly likely that the Brazen bull is a myth. You would think with all of the ancient greek statues we’ve recovered, we would have found a single Brazen bull but no, we never have. It could have been a myth conceived of at the time to get people to behave, or it could have been invented over the years because of human nature. We like to look back at history, point our fingers and say what the hell were they thinking. We like to believe that we’re so enlightened now and we would never do the things those brutes did back then. But not every horrible thing they did back then was true. And the brazen bull might have just been a way to accuse Phalaris of being the most monstrous leader in all of greek history. But maybe we’ll never know.
This has been Heart Starts Pounding