Death by sawing

[5] Parysatis, wife and half-sister of Darius II (r. 423–405 BC) was the real power behind the throne of the Achaemenid Empire; she instigated and became involved in a number of court intrigues, made several enemies, yet had an uncanny knack for dispatching them at an opportune time.

Aulus Gellius, whose work "Attic Nights" is partially preserved, states that death by the saw was mentioned for some offenses in the tables, but that the use of which was so infrequent that no one could remember ever having seen it done.

The translator notes the ambiguity of the original text, but says that later Roman writers understood this to mean that creditors were allowed to cut their shares from the body of the debtor.

[12] This method of execution was uncommon throughout the time of the Roman Empire, though common during Caligula's reign,[13] when the condemned, including members of his own family, were sawn across the torso rather than lengthwise down the body.

Major revolts happened several places, and the main source by Cassius Dio claims that in Cyrene, 220,000 Greeks were massacred by the Jews; in Cyprus, 240,000.

Dio adds that many of the victims were sawn asunder, and that the Jews licked up the blood of the slain, and "twisted the entrails like a girdle about their bodies".

He was defeated in battle, and due to the treachery of his two generals Agilonius and Gomoarius (they had been promised they would be "shown favour" by Valens), he was captured.

Refusing a command to pray at a heathen temple, Symphorosa was scourged, and then thrown in the river Aniene with a large stone fastened to her.

[19][20][failed verification] According to the Martyrologium Romanum, during the reign of Diocletian "wild barbarians" decided to rob a community of monks living at Mount Sinai.

[21] Accused of practising witchcraft and causing the sickness of the wife of the ardently anti-Christian Persian king Shapur II, Tarbula was condemned and executed by being sawn in half in the year 345.

Yates further supplies the detail: "This fellow has since been assassinated-report says, with sanction and approval of the Government"[24] One of the most notorious cases of sawing as execution is that of the Alcaide (castellan/governor) Melec under Sultan Moulay Ishmael (r. 1672–1727).

Melec was now placed on a mule, bound with an iron chain, and led to the public square, where some 4000 of his relatives and members of his tribe were assembled.

The executioner's team then sought to start by sawing him from the head downwards, but Boucasra's sons intervened, and demanded that one began between Melec's legs instead, because otherwise, he would die too quickly.

In the process, chunks of flesh were ripped out by the saw's teeth, causing blood to splatter everywhere, thus making the execution quite unbearable to watch.

[29] This claim was first made by the French captain and traveller Jean Bernard Bossu in his 1768 Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales, translated into English by Johann Reinhold Forster in 1771.

[30] In a footnote to his essay A Map within an Indian Painting?, jurist Morris S. Arnold wrote: "Bossu's books contain a lot of tall tales, so one needs to be cautious about relying on him.

[36] In 1123, Joscelin de Courtenay and Baldwin II were separately ambushed and surprised by a Turkish emir, Balac, and made prisoners at the castle at Quartapiert.

Dressed as monks and pedlars, they gained entry in the town where the two nobles were held captive, and managed, through massacre, to take control of the castle.

Apprised of the capture of the castle, Balac sent quickly a force to recapture it, and Baldwin II saw no possibility of holding it.

[37] The Assassins, a misnomer for the Nizari, an Ismaili sect, had an independent kingdom in the Levant during the age of the Crusades, and were feared and loathed by Muslims and Christians alike.

according to one rendering of the tale:[39]They no sooner found themselves masters of it, than they began to exercise On the inhabitants the most unremitting barbarities, destroying them by every method of ingenious cruelty.

[40] In 1460, the Hungarian general Michael Szilágyi was seized by the Turks, and since he was regarded as a traitor and spy, he was sawn in half at Constantinople.

[44] The Triarchy of Negroponte, a Crusader state or Stato da Màr under control of the Republic of Venice, was extinguished by the capture of the city in 1469/1470, and the governor Paolo Erizzo, is said to treacherously to have been ordered sawn in two, after have being promised his life would be spared.

[55] The Burmese general Maha Bandula is said to have had one of his high-ranking officers sawn in two, due to some act of disobedience, the person being fastened between two planks for that purpose.

[56] On occasion, a confusion of reports may exist where, for example, performed post-mortem indignities are misinterpreted as the actual manner of execution: In 1839, the governor of Vietnam's Nam Định Province summoned five hundred soldiers to a banquet to pressure them into trampling upon a cross in renunciation of Christianity.

The Chinese overcame this problem by securing the victim in an upright position between two boards firmly fixed between stakes driven deep into the ground.

Growing more popular in his martyrdom, the new regime condemned Chen's execution, declared he was a holy man and erected a Canton pagoda in his memory.

The crushing of the revolt was extremely bloody, and at Almería in 1569, the historian Luis del Marmol Carvajal states that one Morisco was sawn apart alive.

A decidedly partisan pamphlet from 1850, Ungarns gutes recht (The well-founded right of Hungary) from 1850, states that in the struggles around Banat, some 4,000 Serbians, spurred on by the preaching of the Metropolitan of Karlovci, Josif Rajačić, committed heinous deeds against the Hungarians.

Sawing people asunder is one of the punishments said to occur in Buddhist Hell, and the priests knew how to make a visible spectacle of sufferings in the beyond, by commissioning artists to make paintings the populace were meant to see and reflect upon:[72]At a Buddhist temple in Canton, at certain seasons of the year, the court is set round with pictures, which pourtray in a fearful manner the sufferings of the dead.