execution by elephant

Other Indian polities also carried out executions by elephant.

Execution by elephant was a common method of capital punishment in South and Southeast Asia, and particularly in India.

The English sailor Robert Knox, writing in 1681, described a method of execution by elephant which he had seen while being held captive in Sri Lanka.

The Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta, visiting Delhi in the 1330s, has left the following eyewitness account of this particular type of execution by elephants:

The Manu Smriti or Laws of Manu, written down around AD 200, prescribed execution by elephants for a number of offences.

During the medieval period, executions by elephants were used by several West Asian imperial powers, including the Byzantine, Sassanid, Seljuq and Timurid empires.

The journal of John Crawfurd records another method of execution by elephant in the kingdom of Cochinchina (modern south Vietnam), where he served as a British envoy in 1821.

They have been used as working animals in forestry, and as war elephants (by commanders such as Hannibal), as well as cultural and ceremonial use such as circus elephants, elephant polo, execution by elephant and displays in zoological gardens.