Annotated Copy of Persia and the Persian Question by George Curzon, with Inserted Papers [‎343r] (688/1814)

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THE GOVERNMENT 457
in which I have heard of robbers being walled up alive in
pillars of brick and mortar was in 1884. 1 Fortunately, the visits
of the Sbab to Europe, and the increasing influence of civilised
opinion, have bad a wonderful effect in mitigating the barbarity of
this truly merciless and Oriental code, and cases of unnecessary
torture are now rarely heard of. The worst criminals are strangled,
or decapitated, or have their throats cut. Robbery and thieving
are expiated by mutilation, a finger or thumb, a band or an ear,
paying the penalty for the offence of the body. But the standard
and most cherished punishment is the bastinado, to which all are
liable, from the king’s sons downwards, and in which a Persian, even
of high rank and station, does not see a much greater indignity
than does an English public schoolboy in the birch-rod. Nowhere
is the house of a governor, or official, or even of a private person
of high degree, without the implements of this hallowed mode of
castigation; the theory of hereditary transmission must almost be
invoked to explain the phenomenal hardness of Persian soles; and
cases have been known where 2,000 switches have been broken, or, in
other words, some 6,000 blows have been delivered, upon the feet of a
single delinquent. On these occasions, the ferashes who administer
the flagellation find a welcome opportunity of mudakhil, the leniency
with which they lay on the strokes being rigidly proportioned to the
bribe which they are promised by the victim. In cases of murder,
the Lex Talionis, or Law of Retaliation, ‘ an eye for an eye, and a
tooth for a tooth, 5 yet prevails; and the family of the murdered
man may still claim the culprit upon his arrest, and kill him as
they please. As late as the autumn of 1888 a case occurred in
which a number of male collaterals of the royal family forced their
way into the compound of the War Office, where a prisoner was
confined who had murdered one of their relatives, hacked him to
pieces with their weapons, and burned his body with petroleum.
But in practice this bloody vendetta is seldom executed except
among the nomad tribes of the south, where blood-feuds survive
for generations, and sometimes result in the extinction of entire
families. In ordinary cases the criminal escapes to the nearest
sanctuary, from which secure retreat a bargain is conducted
with the relatives of his victim as to the price of his free exit and
1 In 1841 the Motemed-ed-Dowleh, Mann^heher Khan, regarded as one of the
severest of Persian governors, built a tower of 300 living men packed in layers of
mortar, near Shiraz.—Layard’s Early Adventures, vol. i. p. 312.