5 Most Painful Ways To Die In Ancient Egypt

When you hear the words "ancient Egypt," you likely think of unexplainable mystery and mystique: the Pyramids of Giza, pharaohs ruling with absolute power, enigmatic hieroglyphs inscribed on tomb walls, etc. But less commonly discussed is the everyday Egyptian who lived, loved, worked, had children, got sick, played games, and eventually died — same as everywhere and everyone else. Elderly Egyptians no doubt broke their hips and developed pneumonia during recovery. Children doubtlessly got cancer and died. Soldiers died of gaping wounds. In this way, the most common ways to die in ancient Egypt were similar to today.

And yet, abnormally above-and-beyond painful deaths did happen in ancient Egypt. But they didn't happen from natural causes, violence, or accidents — they happened to criminals as punishments for crimes. Egypt was very serious about its laws as extensions of cosmic order, Ma'at. The pharaoh was the embodiment of Ma'at on Earth, bridging gods with humans and humans with each other. Under pharaonic law, women who committed adultery had their noses cut off and men got whipped 1,000 times. Crimes like rape resulted in the death penalty. Even theft could result in death. 

But it's the method of capital punishment that makes Egypt stand out. To paint a lesson about order, justice, and law, the death sentence in ancient Egypt manifested in particularly nasty, painful ways. Among them is death by being tossed to a crocodile, being buried alive or drowning, incineration, and being impaled on a stake.

So have you ever wondered what it's like to be munched to death by a prehistoric reptile? Sure, you've seen "Jurassic Park." And while we may not have any T-Rexes prowling our streets (yet), we have the closest modern-day analog in the water: the alligator or crocodile. Alligators are faster, but less aggressive. Crocodiles are slower, hyper-aggressive, and have those freaky, narrow, snaggle-toothed jaws. And you know where there's lots of crocodiles? The Nile River. Nowadays, they cluster in the south. But no matter where they are along the body of water, they're still the second-largest crocodile species in the world, and they were feared during pharaonic Egypt.

Now that we've got the wildlife facts out of the way, we can move on to death. Sources aren't very robust on this particular method of Egyptian execution, but at the very least sites like Egypt Tours and The Infographics Show corroborate the same point: Death by crocodile awaited thieves, particularly repeat offenders. Egyptians revered the crocodile and its home, the Nile. Sobek, the ferocious crocodile-headed god, was a god of fertility, but also presided over the land of the dead. It's not a stretch to imagine thieves being fed back to the Nile, which in turn fed society.

And in case you're wondering if death by crocodile would be painful: Researcher Jackson Njau told the University of California, Berkeley that crocodiles are "messy eaters." They smash their food on rocks to shatter bones, pull their prey apart into edible pieces, do death rolls in the water, and more. Not a good time.   

So we all remember that Vlad the Impaler guy, right? Named after his love of kebabing enemies, the 15th-century Transylvanian maniac was the inspiration for Dracula (and even more evil than you think). To complete the very gruesome picture (reading discretion is advised): When we say "impaler," we mean that Vlad impaled people on stakes either through the anus or vagina. The stake got hammered into place, and then gravity did the rest as a person slid down onto it vertically. And sometimes — we guess to make Vlad extra giddy — the stake's point slipped up through the victim's mouth.

But wouldn't you know it? The ancient Egyptians made it early to the historical impalement party. In fact, death by impalement is one of the more well-known forms of execution in ancient Egypt. Egyptologist David Lorton even argued that it was the only verifiable method of ancient Egyptian execution that we know about. Impalement could either happen in the Vlad way with the body vertical or with the body horizontal. Either way, gravity did the work to, uh ... drive the point home.

As for what crimes earned people the stake, we know that theft ranked high enough. But we're talking about theft more serious than stealing a banana and more like looting a royal tomb. There are no pictorial depictions of such executions anywhere, but Brewminate says that one hieroglyphic text uses the phrase "to give on the wood" to refer to impalement. Like other executions, this was done in public.

Do folks remember the Bible story from Exodus 2 about baby Moses being placed in a basket and floating down the Nile River? As the tale goes, the pharaoh's daughter found Moses, raised him, and bam: You've got Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in 1956's "The Ten Commandments." The Bible says that Moses' basket was made from papyrus and covered in tar and pitch to make it waterproof. But — and you might see where this is going — what do you figure would happen if a basket wasn't made waterproof? If you said "fill up with water and cause the person inside to inhale liquid and drown to death," then ding, ding: Now you're thinking like an ancient Egyptian lawmaker.

So yes, drowning was another way to dispose of meddlesome criminals in ancient Egypt. Not as gruesome-to-see as impalement or as bloody as being shredded by crocodiles, being tossed into the Nile in a sealed basket was more of a "let's just get rid of this guy" option. But no matter how out-of-sight drowning is, it's an incredibly painful way to die. When someone can't breathe, carbon dioxide builds up in the lungs and causes a person to involuntarily gasp for air and eventually inhale liquid. Then hypoxia kicks in — a lack of oxygen to the brain and body. Along the way there are gasps, underwater scrambles for air, clawing at the throat while water-filled lungs burn, and all such horrible things. In ancient Egypt, this would have happened out of sight as the basket sunk into the Nile.

Now we turn to another of the four Greek elements when talking about ancient Egypt's most painful deaths: fire. Death by fire has been a favorite of torturers throughout history, even before we get to those nasty inquisitors and their witch hunts that last from about the early 15th through 18th centuries. We all know how much it hurts to just have a finger graze a hot pan or something. But full-body immersion in a blazing conflagration? That's a whole other level of pain.

Like before, sources are a bit vague on the specifics of death by immolation in ancient Egypt. Sometimes the wording is unclear, as a study from the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient reports. The researchers mention an ancient Egyptian text talking about rebels from Thebes and "each man being burned in the place of his crime." Rebellion against the pharaoh would have been seen as a monstrous act since they were believed to be god on Earth. 

Burning, too, would have been the most extreme form of execution in Egypt because without it, the ba and ka — components of the soul — couldn't survive the journey to and through the afterlife. This is why ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. To them, immolation would not just destroy the body but damn the soul to never reach the afterlife. In fact, the aforementioned study indicates that this method of execution was outside the bounds of Egyptian law and not a part of any prescribed punishment. But we're guessing that if a pharaoh or other lawmaker wanted it done, it would happen.

And so we come to the final horrific and painful way that someone could have died in ancient Egypt: Being buried alive, or immurement (getting sealed up), by its official name. This one is like the whole Moses basket in the Nile thing, except instead of water it's dirt. But rather than inhale dirt, the most likely outcome of being buried alive is asphyxiation. Much like drowning, the cause of death here is a lack of oxygen. Depending on the burial, a person might live for hours after being buried alive and slowly run out of oxygen to breath. During that time, panic and hyperventilation might set in, which would only hasten things, and eventually it would feel like you're breathing through a closed straw. And before the end, you'd have a heart attack. So no, not a painless death. 

But there's a twist with this particular Egyptian death: It wasn't reserved to criminals. When a pharaoh died, servants, wives, or concubines were all buried with them because it was believed that the ruler would need these people in the afterlife. Servants might have been poisoned, strangled, have their throats slit, or be immured in a tomb. Thankfully, most researchers believe the practice petered out after the first dynasty (2900 B.C.E. to  2730 B.C.E.), though there is evidence to suggest it continued in some form through the Middle Kingdom (2030 B.C.E. to 1650 B.C.E.) and beyond. Not that this is any comfort to all of those who died horrible, unnecessary deaths.