The inhabitants of a captured place were usually treated with more or less of severity.  Those regarded as most responsible for the resistance or the rebellion were seized; generally their hands were manacled either before them or behind their backs, while sometimes fetters were attached to their feet, and even rings passed through their lips, and in this abject guise they were brought into the presence of the Assyrian king.  Seated on his throne in his fortified camp without the place, and surrounded by his attendants, he received them one by one, and instantly pronounced their doom.  On some he proudly placed his foot, some he pardoned, a few he ordered for execution, many he sentenced to be torn from their homes and carried into slavery.

Various modes of execution seem to have been employed in the case of condemned captives.  One of them was empalement.  This has always been, and still remains, a common mode of punishment in the East; but the manner of empaling which the Assyrians adopted was peculiar.  They pointed a stake at one end, and, having fixed the other end firmly into the ground, placed their criminal with the pit of his stomach upon the point, and made it enter his body just below the breastbone.  This method of empaling must have destroyed life tolerably soon, and have thus been a far less cruel punishment than the crucifixion of the Romans.  We do not observe it very often in the Assyrian sculptures, nor do we ever see it applied to more than a few individuals.  It was probably reserved for those who were considered the worst criminals.  Another very common mode of executing captives was by beating in their skulls with a mace.  In this case the victim commonly knelt; his two hands were placed before him upon a block or cushion:  behind him stood two executioners, one of whom held him by a cord round the neck, while the other, seizing his back hair in one hand, struck him a furious blow upon the head with a mace which he held in the other. [PLATE CXI., Fig. 5.] It must have been rarely, if ever, that a second blow was needed.

Decapitation was less frequently practised.  The expression, indeed.  “I cut off their heads,” is common in the Inscriptions but in most instances it evidently refers to the practice, already noticed, of collecting the heads of those who had fallen in battle.  Still there are instances, both in the Inscriptions and in the sculptures, of what appears to have been a formal execution of captives by beheading.  In these cases the criminal, it would seem, stood upright, or bending a little forwards, and the executioner, taking him by a lock of hair with his left hand, struck his head from his shoulders with a short sword, which he held in his right. [PLATE CXII., Fig. 5.]