In his " The Golden Bough", James Frazer refers to this custom of drowning royal offenders instead both among the Ashanti people (in present-day Ghana and the Ivory Coast) and in the kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin). The reluctance to shed the king's blood is also attested within a number of African cultures. Within the Ottoman Empire, it became, for some time, a practice to execute the brothers of the chosen sultan in order to prevent political succession crises but these members of the royal family were typically strangled or drowned, so that their blood would not be shed. For example, in the former Sultanate of Pattani, in nowadays southern Thailand one rebel, Tuk Mir, was drowned in the sea, out of respect for his recognized status as Syed, that is, a direct descendant of the family of the Prophet Muhammad. Within Islamic cultures as well, some examples exist that the royal person, or members of the royal family ought not be executed by means of bloodshed, or members of similarly highly respected families. In another Eastern Asian country, the Kingdom of Assam, it was a royal privilege to execute people by shedding their blood lower courts of justice could only order death by drowning, death by cudgelling in the head of the condemned and so on. This practice is resorted to because it is reckoned a sin to spill royal blood When a person of royal extraction is to receive a capital punishment, it is generally done by drowning in the first place the person is tied hands and feet, then sewed up in a red bag, which again is sometimes put into a jar, and thus the prisoner is lowered down into the water, with a weight sufficient to sink him. Felix Carey, missionary in Burma 1806–1812, describes the process as follows: In Cambodia, for example, drowning was the type of execution reserved for members of the royal family. In a variety of cultures, taboos against shedding the blood of royals are attested, and in many cultures, when the execution of a king or members of the royal family was thought necessary, they were drowned to avoid the spilling of blood. Drowning as a method of execution is attested very early in history, for a large variety of cultures and as the method of execution for many types of offences.
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