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!XgOyZOW9AE 03/12/10(Fri)10:05 No. 5433802 SCAPHISM
also known as the boats, was an ancient Persian method of execution
designed to inflict torturous death. The name comes from the Greek word
skaphe, meaning "scooped (or hollowed) out". The naked person was
firmly fastened within a back-to-back pair of narrow rowing boats (or a
hollowed-out tree trunk), with the head, hands, and feet protruding. The
condemned was forced to ingest milk and honey to the point of
developing severe diarrhea, and more honey would be rubbed on his body
in order to attract insects to the exposed appendages. He or she would
then be left to float on a stagnant pond or be exposed to the sun. The
defenseless individual's feces accumulated within the container,
attracting more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her
exposed and increasingly gangrenous flesh. The feeding would be repeated
each day in some cases to prolong the torture, so that dehydration or
starvation did not provide him or her with the release of death. Death,
when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of
dehydration, starvation and septic shock. Delirium would typically set
in after a few days. In other recorded versions, the insects did not
eat the person; biting and stinging insects such as wasps, which were
attracted by honey on the body, acted as the torture. Death by
scaphism was painful, humiliating, and protracted. Plutarch writes in
his biography of Artaxerxes that Mithridates, sentenced to die in this
manner for killing Cyrus the Younger, survived 17 days before dying