In 560 BC, a sculptor walked into a tyrant’s palace carrying the blueprints for a giant bronze bull and he promised the king that this bull would turn the screams of dying men into beautiful music. The king loved the idea so much that he made the sculptor climb inside first, lit a fire underneath, and listened as the inventor became the first victim of his own creation.
But that bull was only the beginning because humanity spent the next 3,000 years dreaming up methods so twisted that some of them kept victims alive and suffering for over 17 days straight. Number 20, death by elephant. Long before firing squads and electric chairs existed, the empires of South and Southeast Asia had a very different idea of what public execution should look like and it involved a 5-ton animal trained to kill on command.
Rulers in India, Persia, and parts of Southeast Asia would bring condemned prisoners into a public square, force them to their knees, and then signal a war elephant to crush their skulls. But these elephants were not just stomping randomly. Handlers had trained them to prolong the process, sometimes breaking limbs one at a time before delivering the final blow.
The Mughal Empire used this method well into the 1800s and European travelers who witnessed it wrote home describing scenes they could not believe were real. And somehow, that is the tamest entry on this entire list. Number 19, the blood eagle. The Vikings earned their reputation for violence on the battlefield, but nothing they did in open combat compared to what they reserved for their greatest enemies.
The blood eagle, described in multiple Norse sagas, involved pinning a victim face down, cutting open their back along the spine, breaking the ribs away from the backbone one by one, and then pulling the lungs out through the opening so they spread wide like a pair of wings. King Aella of Northumbria suffered this fate around 867 AD at the hands of the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok as revenge for throwing their father into a pit of snakes.
Whether every detail happened exactly as the sagas describe >> >> is still debated, but multiple independent sources reference the same method and that alone tells you something about the world the Vikings lived in. And if you think a Viking revenge killing sounds bad, >> >> wait until you hear what medieval Europe was doing with a pot of boiling water.
Number 18, boiling alive. Imagine being lowered feet first into a cauldron of boiling water, oil, or even molten lead with your executioner controlling exactly how slowly you went in. During the reign of Henry VIII in the 1530s, England passed a law making boiling the official punishment for poisoners. A cook named Richard Roose was one of the first to be executed under that law in 1531 after poisoning a pot of soup that killed two people.
Records from the era show that some victims were kept alive in the boiling liquid for up to 2 hours before they finally died. A Japanese bandit named Ishikawa Goemon met this same fate in the late 1500s after attempting to kill the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. According to local accounts, he was boiled alive in an iron cauldron in front of the entire city of Kyoto while holding his young son above the liquid desperately trying to keep the boy from sinking in.
2 hours in boiling oil and that still only gets you number 18 on this list. Number 17, flaying. Skinning a person alive has been documented as far back as 911 BC during the Assyrian Empire and the Assyrians were proud enough of it to carve images of themselves flaying captured enemies directly into the walls of their own palaces.
The process could keep a victim alive and conscious through most of it because the skin itself contains fewer major blood vessels than the tissue underneath. A Persian judge named Sisamnes was flayed alive around 500 BC by King Cambyses II after being caught taking bribes and according to the historian Herodotus, the king then draped the judge’s skin over the courtroom chair as a permanent warning to whoever sat in it next.
But flaying at least ended in death within hours. The next entry on this list could drag out suffering for weeks. Number 16, immurement. Being sealed alive inside a wall sounds like something from a horror movie, but it was a real method of execution used from ancient Rome all the way into the early 1900s.
The Vestal Virgins of Rome faced this punishment if they broke their vows and they were entombed underground with just a small amount of food and water left to slowly starve in total darkness. The most disturbing recorded case happened in Morocco in 1906 when a shoemaker named Haj Mohammed Mesfioui was convicted of murdering 36 women.
His sentence was to be bricked into a small recess in the wall of the central bazaar in Marrakech standing upright while the city went about its business around him as he slowly died behind the stone. 36 murders and his punishment was to become part of the architecture. But at least his suffering was silent.
The next method on this list made sure everyone could hear it. Number 15, sawing in half. The condemned person was hung upside down by their ankles so that blood would rush to their head and then two executioners would begin sawing through the body starting from between the legs and working downward toward the skull.
Because the victim was inverted, the brain received enough blood flow to prevent them from losing consciousness. Some accounts claim that victims remained conscious until the saw reached their navel. This method appeared in biblical era references across medieval Europe and in parts of China well into the 1600s.
And yet, that level of cruelty still falls short of the device that comes next. Number 14, the brazen bull. Remember that bronze bull from the beginning of this video? The full story is even worse than what you already heard. Around 560 BC, a sculptor named Perillos of Athens designed this hollow bronze statue for Phalaris, the tyrant of Acragas in Sicily.
The bull had a trapdoor in the side and a system of tubes through the head that converted the screams of the person being roasted alive into sounds resembling a bellowing bull. Phalaris ordered Perillos to climb inside >> >> and demonstrate how the pipes worked. The moment the sculptor stepped in, the king locked the door and lit a fire underneath.
Perillos survived only because Phalaris pulled him out half dead and then had him thrown off a cliff. And in a twist of pure poetic justice, Phalaris himself was overthrown by his own people and according to the poet Pindar, was killed inside the very same bull he had used on so many others. The inventor, the tyrant, and the device all consumed by the same fire.
But if you think being roasted alive inside a metal statue is as bad as it gets, you have clearly never heard of crucifixion. Number 13, crucifixion. The Romans perfected crucifixion into one of the slowest public executions ever designed. Victims were stripped, beaten with leather whips embedded with bone and metal, and then forced to carry the crossbeam to the execution site while crowds watched.
Once nailed to the cross, a person could survive anywhere from a few hours to several days. Death came from a combination of shock, dehydration, and gradual suffocation because the position made breathing harder with every passing hour. And each breath required the victim to push up on their nailed feet just to fill their lungs.
After the slave revolt led by Spartacus was crushed in 71 BC, the Romans crucified over 6,000 captured rebels along the Appian Way. That works out to roughly one dying body >> >> every 90 ft for more than 100 miles of road between Capua and Rome. And we are still only at the halfway point of this list.
Number 12, scaphism. The ancient Persians came up with something so horrifying that even reading about it feels like an endurance test and this method had its own nickname. They called it the boats. The victim was stripped and tied between two boats with their arms, legs, and head sticking out.
Then force-fed a mixture of milk and honey until they developed severe diarrhea. The same mixture was smeared over their exposed skin and the entire contraption was left floating on a stagnant pond under the open sun. Insects would swarm within hours feeding on the honey, burrowing into the flesh, and laying eggs in every opening they could find.
A Persian soldier named Mithridates endured this for 17 consecutive days before he finally died after angering King Artaxerxes II at a banquet in 401 BC. 17 days floating on a swamp being eaten alive from the inside out. Hold onto that number because the top 10 is about to make everything so far look almost tame.
Number 11, breaking on the wheel. Medieval Europeans turned execution into community entertainment and the breaking wheel gave them one of the worst spectacles imaginable. The condemned person was tied spread-eagle to a large wooden wheel and the executioner used a heavy iron hammer to shatter every major bone in the body starting with the arms and legs.
After the breaking, the shattered body was woven through the spokes of the wheel which was raised on a tall pole and left on display for days with the victim still alive above the heads of passing townspeople. In 1747, a highway robber in Orléans, France was broken on the wheel and the executioner handed what he assumed was a corpse to a local surgeon only for the surgeon to discover that the man was still breathing.
Imagine explaining that one to the medical staff. If you are finding this as disturbing as I think you are, hit subscribe because this channel covers the parts of history that everyone else skips and trust me, the top 10 gets significantly worse. Number 10, hanging, drawing, and quartering. England reserved this for men convicted of high treason and it was built to squeeze out the maximum suffering before death.
The prisoner was dragged through the streets tied to a horse then hanged by the neck but cut down while still alive. While still conscious, they were laid on a table where the executioner sliced open their abdomen, pulled out their organs, and burned them in front of the victim’s own face.
Only after all of that was the person beheaded and then the body was chopped into four pieces sent to different parts of the kingdom. William Wallace suffered this exact fate >> >> in 1305. His body parts were shipped to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling, and Perth so that every corner of the kingdom would see what happened to rebels.
But as gruesome as that sounds, at least it ended within hours. The next few entries stretch death out over days. Number nine, impalement. Vlad III of Wallachia earned the name Vlad the Impaler by executing an estimated 20,000 people on wooden stakes during the 1400s. The stake was driven through the victim’s body from below and pushed upward through the torso and skilled executioners knew how to angle it to avoid major organs so the victim would stay alive for two to three days.
When the Ottoman Empire sent 90,000 soldiers to invade Wallachia in 1462, their scouts encountered a field containing 20,000 impaled bodies rotting in the open sun. The battle-hardened Ottoman commander, Mehmed II, seriously considered turning his army around and going home. 20,000 bodies on stakes, that was the welcome mat and the methods from here on out only get more personal and more deliberate.
Number eight, ling chi. Known as death by a thousand cuts, ling chi was practiced in China for roughly a thousand years until it was officially banned in 1905. A trained executioner used a razor-sharp knife to systematically remove small pieces of flesh from the condemned person’s body while keeping them alive as long as the blade work would allow.
One of the last known victims was a servant named Wang Weichen who was executed in Beijing in 1904 after murdering his master and 11 members of his master’s family. French soldiers stationed nearby photographed the entire process and those images spread across Europe faster than any news story becoming some of the most circulated horror photographs of the early 20th century.
The Chinese government abolished ling chi the following year not because of domestic outrage but because those photographs were creating an international embarrassment they could no longer contain. Speaking of Rome and its endless creativity with punishment, the next entry proves that the Romans could be just as inventive with animals as the Persians were with insects.
Number seven, poena cullei. Ancient Rome gave us roads, aqueducts, and representative government but they also gave us poena cullei which translates to penalty of the sack. The condemned person was beaten with rods then sewn alive inside a large leather sack along with a live snake, a rooster, a monkey, and a dog.
The entire sack was thrown into the nearest river. The terrified animals would attack whatever was closest to them which was always the human and the entire group would eventually drown together. Emperor Hadrian used this punishment multiple times and it remained an official Roman sentence for centuries.
The Romans at least killed you within minutes once the sack hit the water >> >> but from this point forward on the list, speed is no longer part of the equation. Number six, burning at the stake. Joan of Arc was 19 years old when she was tied to a wooden stake in the market square of Rouen, France on May 30th, 1431 and burned alive in front of hundreds of spectators.
Witnesses to her execution said it took roughly 30 minutes before she stopped moving. 30 minutes of standing in flames while an entire city square watched. But Joan was far from the only person executed this way. Burning at the stake was the standard punishment for heresy across Europe for over 300 years and estimates place the total number killed during the witch trial era between 40,000 and 60,000 people.
The fire was deliberately built to burn slowly because religious authorities believed a drawn-out death gave the condemned more time to repent. You would think burning alive would be near the top of any list like this but we still have five entries left and every single one of them found a way to be worse.
Number five, rat torture. A bucket containing starving rats was placed on the victim’s bare stomach and the open end was sealed tight against the skin. Hot coals were placed on top of the bucket and as the metal heated up the rats inside panicked and desperately searched for a way out of the rising heat. The only direction available was down straight through the victim’s flesh and into the body cavity.
Diederik Sonoy, a Dutch rebel commander during the 80 Years’ War in the late 1500s, used this method on captured Spanish prisoners to extract information. The victim could do nothing but lie completely still and feel every second of what was happening to them. And if you think rats are bad the next entry involves something even more relentless.
The ocean itself. Number four, keelhauling. The Dutch and British navies created an execution method built specifically for the open sea. Keelhauling involved tying a rope around the condemned sailor, throwing them overboard at the front of the ship, and dragging them underneath the hull all the way to the stern.
The underside of a wooden sailing vessel was covered in razor-sharp barnacles so the victim’s body was shredded across the entire length of the ship while simultaneously being hung underwater. A Dutch sailor named Jan Janszoon van Hoorn was among the documented cases in the 17th century. The Dutch navy did not officially ban the practice until 1853 and some captains dragged the same sailor under the ship more than once.
Number three, the Judas cradle. This device was a tall wooden stool with a sharp pyramid-shaped point on top and the victim was suspended above it by ropes before being slowly lowered onto it. The victim’s own body weight did all the work and executioners controlled the speed by adjusting the ropes.
The device was never cleaned between uses which guaranteed infection even if the victim survived the initial session. Interrogators during the Spanish Inquisition kept prisoners on the device for hours, lifted them off, allowed wounds to partially close, and then lowered them back onto it the following day.
The psychological destruction of knowing you would be placed back on it was considered just as valuable as the physical damage. But everything from number 20 down to number three has been a method, a category of punishment applied to many people over centuries. The final two entries are specific, individually documented executions, and they are the most horrifying single events on this entire list.
Number two, the execution of Robert-François Damiens, 1757. On March 28th, 1757, a domestic servant named Robert-François Damiens was led to the Place de Grève in Paris to be publicly executed for attempting to stab King Louis the 15th with a penknife. The wound he inflicted was barely a scratch, but the punishment the French court handed down would last over 4 hours and become one of the most documented single executions in European history.
First, the hand that held the knife was slowly burned with sulfur until the flesh melted off the bone. Then, executioners used red-hot iron pincers to tear chunks of flesh from his chest, arms, and thighs. Molten lead, boiling oil, and burning wax were poured directly into the open wounds. And then, four horses were harnessed to his arms and legs to pull him apart.
But, the executioner had never quartered anyone before, because France had not performed this punishment in over 140 years. The horses pulled for over an hour, but the joints would not separate. The executioner was finally ordered to cut the tendons with a knife so the horses could finish the job.
Even after his limbs were torn away, eyewitnesses said that Damiens’ jaw was still moving as if he was trying to speak. The famous adventurer, Giacomo Casanova, watched the entire thing from a window above the square, and later wrote that it lasted roughly 4 hours, and that he had to look away multiple times >> >> when he heard the screams.
4 hours for a scratch on a king’s arm. But, even that does not compare to number one. Number one, the throne of fire. György Dózsa, 1514. In 1514, a Transylvanian knight named György Dózsa led a peasant rebellion against the Hungarian nobility, and when he was captured, the ruling class decided to create a punishment so extreme that nobody would dare rebel for generations.
They heated an iron chair until it glowed red, and then forced Dózsa to sit on it while the metal seared the flesh off his legs and back. They placed a red-hot iron crown on his head and pressed a burning iron scepter into his hand, mocking him as the king of the peasants, while the metal burned through skin and into bone.
And then came the final act that puts this above everything else on this list. They brought out Dózsa’s closest followers, men who had fought beside him and believed in his cause, who had been deliberately starved in their cells for days. And they forced those starving men to bite into Dózsa’s still living, still burning flesh, and eat it while he was conscious enough to watch it happen.
A man sitting on a throne of fire, wearing a crown of fire, being eaten alive by the people he loved. That is the single most sadistic, individually recorded execution in the history of the world. And that is what human beings are capable of when they decide to make an example out of someone. 3,000 years of recorded history, 20 entries, and the one thread connecting every civilization on this list is the same uncomfortable truth.
The methods evolved, the justifications shifted from religion to law to politics, but the willingness to turn someone’s death into a performance and stretch their suffering out as long as possible, that part never changed. The bronze bull, the wheel, the boats, the throne, different centuries, different continents, same impulse buried in the same species.
The video on screen right now goes even deeper into the ancient world, >> >> and you are going to want to see it. Subscribe if you have not already, because this is the channel where history stops being polite.
