Scaphism

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Scaphism, also known as the boats, is an ancient Persian method of execution designed to inflict torturous death. The name comes from the Greek word skaphe, meaning "scooped (or hollowed) out" and from Latin word meaning "boats".

The naked victim would be firmly fastened within a back-to-back pair of narrow rowboats (or in some variations a hollowed out tree trunk), the head, hands, and feet protruding from this improvised container.

The victim was forced to ingest milk and honey to the point of developing severe diarrhea, and more honey would be rubbed on his body so as to attract insects to the exposed appendages. They would then be left to float on a stagnant pond (or alternately, simply exposed to the sun somewhere). The defenseless victim's feces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her exposed (and increasingly gangrenous) flesh. Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock.

In other recorded versions, the insects did not eat the victim; biting and stinging insects such as wasps, which were attracted by honey on the body, acted as the torture.

Death by scaphism is painful, humiliating, and protracted. Plutarch writes in Artaxerxes that Mithridates, sentenced to die in this manner for killing Cyrus the Younger, survived 17 days before dying.¹

[edit] Similar practices

Simpler installations to the same end have been reported among certain Native American tribes, such as immobilizing the victim, smearing him and leaving him to voracious ants. Without the prior forcefeeding, starvation would set in within a few days.

In early historic times in Siberia, a condemned prisoner would be tied naked to a tree and left to slowly die through starvation and blood loss from mosquitoes, horseflies and other insects.

Richard Sair refers to one case in modern China in which a man was allegedly chained up outside where the mosquitoes bit him².

Hungarian countess and alleged vampire Elizabeth Báthory allegedly delighted during the summer in having maids stripped, smeared with honey, and left outside to be bitten and stung to death by insects.

A similarly gruesome method was known as exposure in animal skin, the act of putting the victim inside the empty carcass of a donkey or a horse, sewing it up and leaving the corpse out in the sun.

[edit] Citations

Note 1: Artaxerxes, Plutarch, (75 A.C.E)
Note 2: Sair, Richard (Sometimes catalogued as Hirsch, Arnold.) "The Book of Torture and Executions". Golden Books, Toronto. 1944. (So catalogued because [a] Dr. Hirsch was the editor and [b] Sair's name appears nowhere in print on the work, only in the L of C cataloguing info, which is so precise as to indicate that "the title of this work was formerly known [sic] as The Book of Torture and Flagellation.")