The year is 323 BC and an army is gathered in the city of Babylon.
Alexander the Great has just died and the new general in town, one Perdiccas, is about
to punish around 300 men that have been accused of joining a mutiny.
These men, as the history books say, are “paralyzed and at his mercy.”
They are about to know what it feels like to have an elephant crush their bones.
They are about to face possibly the worst kind of execution: Death by elephant.
This type of execution in the days of ancient Macedonia and Rome was usually reserved for
war criminals, mutineers, and prisoners of war.
The very thought of being crushed by a pachyderm was enough to make any man think twice about
betraying his leader.
General Lucius Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus knew as much, and that’s why he made people
watch when he threw men to the elephants.
It was a sight to be seen, men being squashed and thrown around by massive, angry beasts.
The general believed that such a sight is good for military discipline.
No kidding.
While we tend to think it was Western powers that used elephants in this way, the most
brutal stories come from the other side of the world, the East.
Over in Asia the practice happened right up until the 19th century and it was only stopped
after powerful European nations said something like, “Hey guys, we might have violently
colonized you, stolen from you, and been awful in myriad ways, but we’d now like you to
stop crushing folks with elephants.”
As you’ll see, in some Asian nations the elephants didn’t just crush a man fast;
those beasts were trained to make death slow and painful.
Let’s start with India, a country where at one time death by elephant was the execution
of choice.
Thieves, prisoners of war, rebels, and even tax evaders might have gone this way.
There are chronicles that mention people being crushed merely for stealing someone’s property.
A Scottish captain named Alexander Hamilton sailed around the East in the 1700s and he
wrote a book about his time in India.
In that book he talked about men being sent to the “Elephant Garden”.
That’s a nice sounding name but not when you consider that the Elephant Garden was
actually a crushing ground.
Then you had the Mughal rulers, men who sometimes put on shows which involved condemned men
being crushed by those large animals.
The French traveler and physician François Bernier ended up being the personal doctor
to the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh.
He wrote about some of the things he witnessed when working for the prince, stating that
he was utterly shocked to see how much pleasure rulers derived from having men killed this
way.
There is one account that makes being crushed immediately sound like a blessing.
In that account that writer states that the elephant was controlled by the mahout, a man
who had trained the animal to do exactly what he ordered.
He made the elephant pick up the condemned men and throw them into the air.
If that wasn’t bad enough, large blades were attached to the elephant’s feet, blades
that would slash at the condemned man.
Here’s another part of that account, word for word:
“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.”
Yikes, could there be a worse way to die?
Well, there are even worse accounts than that.
It’s even worse when you consider that one historian wrote that men might die this way
for a “trifling offense.”
A Scottish writer and surgeon named Robert Kerr said when he stayed with the King of
Goa in the 19th century he saw brutal things.
He said that if the King saw fit, the execution would be slow.
If the King showed mercy, he’d order the mahout to make the elephant kill the man fast.
There are many, many accounts of this happening in India.
The Europeans that watched the feat sometimes compared it to being broken on the wheel since
the mahout made the bashing last so long.
One guy even asked if the elephants had human reasoning, given that they seemed to be able
to kill a man so slowly and so agonizingly.
There’s an account from an execution that happened in 1814.
This one was quite unique.
The criminal’s legs were tied with rope and that rope was also tied to one of the
elephant’s legs.
When the elephant was made to move it did so, but with such a violent movement that
the man’s legs were dislocated.
When the man was broken enough – at about the one-hour mark – the elephant was ordered
to put its foot on top of the man’s head and press down.
The human skull is no match for an elephant’s weight.
You can imagine what the scene looked like.
On other occasions it would be fast.
The condemned man would simply be ordered to put his head on a pedestal.
The rulers would roar with laughter when the elephant would turn up and put its foot on
top of the head.
Things were just as bad outside of India, too.
Take for instance the country of Thailand.
When elephants were used to kill people in that country it wasn’t called Thailand but
was called Siam.
We know death by elephant went down there in the 1700s because that Scottish captain
we mentioned earlier also made the voyage there.
He wrote that this kind of execution was used on men that had committed the worst kind of
crime, that of murder or of treason.
The modus operandi would usually consist of the condemned man being tied to a stake.
The elephant was then brought in and was ordered to walk around the man, a person that no doubt
felt very frightened.
After a while the elephant was told by the executioner to throw the man into the air.
This was all part of the show, and a show it was, because according to that writer the
elephant would catch the man in its mouth, after which, it would deliver the coup de
gras: the foot stomp.
The Vietnamese weren’t so creative.
Over there the condemned would be tied up and then the elephant would basically be told
to do its worst.
The beast would run at the man and beat him to death very quickly.
Similar style executions also happened in Myanmar and Malaysia in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
They no doubt happened for centuries prior to that but there weren’t any European sailors
taking notes.
You might be thinking how did men make those beasts do what they wanted?
The answer is that men have been making elephants do things for a very long time.
The animals are very intelligent.
These days they might paint pictures or play basketball, and so getting them to throw men
around without immediately killing them shouldn’t have been too difficult.
Now for Sri Lanka, where arguably the worst executions by elephants went down.
This time the notes were taken by an English sailor named Robert Knox.
According to him, during executions over there the elephant’s tusks were fitted with sharp
knives.
The elephant was ordered to hold the man down with one of its feet and then start cutting
into the man with its tusks.
It would basically tear the man apart and throw the body parts to the side.
Maybe that sounds like fake news to you, but there are more accounts.
The British supposedly outlawed such practice but it seems that law was broken.
In 1850 a British diplomat named Henry Charles Sirr wrote about what he saw.
He wrote that he was around when the last tyrant king of a place called Candy relished
this form of execution.
He said that the animals had been trained very well, so well that they knew how to prolong
the death of the condemned.
In his own words he said that the elephants were “taught to prolong the agony of the
wretched sufferers by crushing the limbs, avoiding the vital parts.”
Apparently, the king and the executioner took great pride in being able to control such
a large and magnificent beast.
The elephant followed orders and threw the man around, but when the chief said, “finish
him”, it put one leg on the man’s abdomen and another leg on the man’s head and the
job was done.
The wretch was put out of his misery.
It was this control that leaders had over elephants that seems to have gained them a
lot of respect.
Well, respect and fear.
The main reason why elephants were used to execute people was to show the public that
not only did the ruler have power over the people but he was also dominant over nature.
In what is present day Iraq a sultan was said to have been able to simply talk to the elephant
and the elephant would do what it was told.
According to a twelfth-century Jewish traveler and writer all a sultan had to say was, “This
man is guilty.”
After that, the elephant would throw the condemned man in the air and then crush him.
Over in Iran there was the Sassanid king Khosrau II.
According to the history books this guy had a lot of love interests.
He amassed 3,000 wives and had 12,000 female slaves.
You’d think that would have been enough, but it seems the king wanted more.
He said he wanted the daughter of the Christian Arab king Al-Nu'man III ibn al-Mundhir.
He was met with refusal, after all, how could the daughter of a Christian join the harem
of a man that was a Zoroastrian.
The two fell out, and king Al-Nu'man III ibn al-Mundhir was executed by elephant.
Was mercy ever shown?
The answer to that is yes.
You see, like we said, the rulers enjoyed what power they had over those huge beasts.
At times they’d use that power to kill a man, but at other times they’d use it to
show just how merciful they were.
There are stories about kings of Siam ordering the elephants to play around with the condemned
man, just roll him around a while on the ground but not cause any grievous injury.
That must have been scary as hell, but at least the man kept his limbs and head.
The Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great also showed some mercy at times.
He’d take a prisoner and would send him to the elephant, although the animal was ordered
to only push the guy around a bit.
This was supposed to be a punishment, not a death penalty.
The history books tell us that one time he brought the condemned man out five days in
a row to be pushed around for a while but then the man was granted his freedom.
Other times there would be what’s called a “trial by ordeal”, which basically means
that the condemned person was left alone with the elephant and if he survived then good
for him, he was likely not guilty of the crime he had been accused of.
The Gods or the Gods must have taken pity on him.
That or the elephant wasn’t in much of a killing mood.
Still today in parts of the world we have mentioned in this show elephants pose a danger
to humans.
People get trampled and crushed, but then there are reports that say tourists do silly
things like taunt the elephants, and there are plenty of other stories that talk about
how some elephants are mistreated.
Sometimes the elephants are wild.
Only a month before we wrote this show a Thai man was trampled to death by five wild elephants.
He was driving down the road on his motorbike when the animals surrounded him.
He didn’t last long after that, which tells you just how powerful the beasts are.
Now you need to watch this, “The Catherine Wheel - Worst Punishments In The History of
Mankind.”
Or, have a look at this, “Drawn and Quartered - Worst Punishments In History of Mankind.”