Everything about Crushing By Elephant totally explained
Crushing by elephant (literally "casting beneath an
elephant's feet") was for thousands of years a common method of execution for those
condemned to death in
South and
Southeast Asia, and particularly in
India.
Asian Elephants were used to crush, dismember, or torture captives in public executions. The trained animals were versatile, able to kill a victim immediately or to torture them slowly for a prolonged period. Employed by royalty, the elephants were representative both of absolute power and the ruler's ability to control wild animals.
The use of elephants to execute captives often attracted the horrified interest of European travellers, and was recorded in numerous contemporary journals and accounts of life in Asia. The practice was eventually suppressed by the European empires that colonised the region in the 18th and 19th centuries. While primarily confined to Asia, the practice was occasionally adopted by western powers, such as
Rome and
Carthage, particularly to deal with mutinous soldiers.
Cultural aspects
The intelligence, domestication, and versatility of elephants gave them considerable advantages over other wild animals such as
lions and
bears used as executioners by the Romans. Elephants are more tractable than
horses: while a horse can be trained to charge into battle, it won't willingly trample an enemy soldier, and will instead step over him. Elephants will trample their enemies, hence the popularity of
war elephants with generals such as
Hannibal. Elephants can be trained to execute prisoners in a variety of ways, and can be taught to prolong the agony of the victim by inflicting a slow death by torture or quickly killing the condemned by stepping on the head. Historically, the elephants were under the constant control of a driver or
mahout, thus enabling a ruler to grant a last-minute reprieve and display merciful qualities.
Several such exercises of mercy are recorded in various Asian kingdoms. The kings of
Siam trained their elephants to roll the convicted person "about the ground rather slowly so that he isn't badly hurt". The
Mughal sultan Akbar the Great is said to have "used this technique to chastise 'rebels' and then in the end the prisoners, presumably much chastened, were given their lives". Elephants were even sometimes used in a kind of
trial by ordeal in which the condemned prisoner was released if he managed to fend off the elephant.}}
South Asia
Sri Lanka
Elephants were widely used across the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia as a method of execution. The English sailor
Robert Knox, writing in 1681, described a method of execution by elephant which he'd seen 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 "then tear it in pieces, and throw it limb from limb".
The 19th century traveller
James Emerson Tennent comments that "a Kandyan [SriLankan] 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." Knox's book depicts exactly this method of execution in a famous drawing, "".
Writing in 1850, the British diplomat Sir
Henry Charles Sirr described a visit to one of the elephants that had been used by
Sri Vikrama Rajasinha, the last king of
Kandy, to execute criminals. Crushing by elephant had been abolished by the British after they overthrew the Kandyan kingdom in 1815 but the king's execution elephant was still alive and evidently remembered its former duties. Sirr comments:
India
Elephants were used as executioners of choice in India for many centuries. Hindu and Muslim rulers executed tax evaders, rebels and enemy soldiers alike "under the feet of elephants".
During the
Mughal era, "it was a common mode of execution in those days to have the offender trampled underfoot by an elephant." Captain
Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1727, described how the Mughal ruler
Shah Jahan ordered an offending military commander to be carried "to the Elephant Garden, and there to be executed by an Elephant, which is reckoned to be a shameful and terrible Death". The
Mughal Emperor Humayun ordered the crushing by elephant of an
imam he mistakenly believed to be critical of his reign. Some monarchs also adopted this form of execution for their own entertainment. Another Mughal ruler, the emperor
Jahangir, is said to have ordered a huge number of criminals to be crushed for his amusement. The
French traveller
François Bernier, who witnessed such executions, recorded his dismay at the pleasure that the emperor derived from this cruel punishment. Another Maratha leader, the general
Santaji, inflicted the punishment for breaches in military discipline. The contemporary historian
Khafi Khan reported that "for a trifling offense he [Santaji] would cast a man under the feet of an elephant."
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." 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".
Such executions were often held in public as a warning to any who might transgress. To that end, many of the elephants were especially large, often weighing in excess of nine tons. The executions were intended to be gruesome and, by all accounts, they often were. 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
Baroda in 1814 has been preserved in The Percy Anecdotes:
Louis Rousselet described the execution of a criminal by an 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 "
Le Tour du Monde", a widely circulated French journal of travel and adventure, as well as foreign journals such as
Harper's Weekly.
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'."
Southeast Asia
Elephants are widely reported to have been used to carry out executions in southeast Asia, and were used in
Burma from the earliest historical times as well as in the kingdom of
Champa on the other side of the
Indochinese peninsula. In
Siam, elephants were trained to throw the condemned into the air before trampling them to death.
Western empires
The
Romans,
Carthaginians and
Macedonian Greeks occasionally used elephants for executions while also making use of
war elephants for military purposes, most famously in the case of
Hannibal. Deserters, prisoners of war and military criminals are recorded by ancient chroniclers to have been put to death under the foot of an elephant.
Perdiccas, who became regent of
Macedon on the death of
Alexander the Great in 323 BC, had mutineers from the faction of
Meleager thrown to the elephants to be crushed in the city of
Babylon. The Roman writer
Quintus Curtius Rufus relates the story in his Historiae Alexandri Magni: "Perdiccas saw that they [themutineers] 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
Valerius Maximus records how the general
Lucius Aemilius Paulus Macedonicus "after King
Perseus was vanquished [in167 BC], for the same fault (desertion) threw men under elephants to be trampled ... And indeed military discipline needs this kind of severe and abrupt punishment, because this is how strength of arms stands firm, which, when it falls away from the right course, will be subverted."
There are fewer records of elephants being used as straightforward executioners for the civil population. One such example is mentioned by
Josephus and the
deuterocanonical book of
3 Maccabees in connection with the
Egyptian Jews, though the story is probably apocryphal. 3 Maccabees describes an attempt by
Ptolemy IV Philopator (ruled 221–204 BC) to enslave and brand Egypt's Jews with the symbol of
Dionysus. When the majority of the Jews resisted, the king is said to have rounded them up and ordered them to be trampled on by elephants. The mass execution was ultimately thwarted, supposedly by the intervention of angels, following which Ptolemy took an altogether more forgiving attitude towards his Jewish subjects.
Death by elephant
Death by elephant is still common in parts of Africa and South Asia where humans and elephants co-exist. In
Sri Lanka alone, 50–100 people are killed annually in clashes between humans and elephants. However, such fatalities are the result of wild elephants attacking humans rather than tame elephants being used by humans to kill others. Being crushed by captive elephants is also a major occupational hazard for elephant keepers in zoos.
While working as a police officer for the British colonial government in
Burma in 1926,
George Orwell was forced to deal with an incident in which a domestic elephant went "
musth" and killed a man by stepping on him. Orwell describes the incident in his famous essay "
Shooting an Elephant", noting that "The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit."
Further Information
Get more info on 'Crushing By Elephant'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://crushing_by_elephant.totallyexplained.com">Crushing by elephant Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
