Read The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment through History for Free Online Page B

a public whipping. Curiously, the manner of the whipping differed with the sex of the offender. Women were whipped while in a kneeling position, but men were laid on the ground, face down, in a spread-eagle posture. In both cases the condemned’s garment was stripped from their back before punishment commenced. Logically, the severity of the whipping increased with the severity of the crime. When a man was convicted of having committed adultery with a slave (who was recognised as having no way to protect themselves from such advances) he could be sentenced to as many as 1,000 lashes. Now either this number was not meant to be taken literally, or the whipping was administered with something less than a bundle of sharp reeds or a heavy whip, as such devices would have literally torn the corpse to pieces to no possible end beyond exhausting the torture master. Curiously, when a woman was convicted of adultery she was not executed. Instead, her nose was cut off. Such a punishment would not have prevented her from bearing children, but would undoubtedly have made her less than attractive to future lovers. Physical mutilation was not unique to female adulterers and a number of other crimes carried various forms of mutilation as their punishment. Interestingly, when a person was found to have falsely accused another of any type of crime they were sentenced to the same punishment that their intended victim had, or would have, received. One can reasonably assume that perjury in Pharonic courts was a fairly rare occurrence.

     
This image depicts the flogging of Egyptian prisoners of war or criminals. Whether the figure on the right is pleading for clemency or is participating in the flogging is uncertain.
     

     
This image shows two prisoners of war being flayed alive by the Assyrians while staked out on the ground and a third has been decapitated. This sort of image was important propaganda for its time. It showed the harsh and severe consequences for opposing Assyrian might and served as a warning to neighbouring kingdoms.
     
    The Egyptians were a proud people, and one of the greatest humiliations they could experience was being taken prisoner in battle. Death was preferable to such dishonour. Consequently, when Egyptian armies captured enemy soldiers, their treatment of the vanquished was unpleasant at best. When being marched to captivity, prisoners were bound neck-to-neck, by a series of nooses, kept tight enough to be galling, but not tight enough to cause strangulation. To make the prisoners still more uncomfortable, their elbows were bound tightly together behind their backs. Sometimes, if Pharaoh’s army had had a particularly hard time of it, the prisoners’ agony was intensified by having a cord run from their bound wrists, up their back and around their already bound neck. The more the victim struggled to ease the pain in his elbows and wrists, the more likely he was to strangle himself. Those prisoners who survived the long march back to captivity were generally sold as slaves – after having their eyes, or tongues, cut out. The moral is obvious: don’t make war on the Pharaoh.
    A slightly later middle-Eastern civilization, from which a scant few judicial records survive, was the city-state of Eshunna, which flourished between 2000 BC and 1720 BC, and was located only about 30 miles (50km) north of present-day Baghdad, Iraq. Eshunna seems to have had a law covering almost every aspect of daily life and its judicial code includes such familiar offences as theft, burglary, kidnapping, murder, bodily injuries, sex crimes and injury purposefully inflicted on animals. For lesser offences, the judges of Eshunna may have been the first to impose fines rather than inflict bodily punishment – at least a fine would have gone further toward real compensation than the small satisfaction of watching a criminal having the hide flogged from his back. Curiously, when crimes were committed at night they inevitably brought a