On a cold November day in 1675, a man named Matti Das stood bound between two posts in the great market square of Mughal Delhi. A crowd of shopkeepers and porters gathered as they did for any execution on that street. The executioners rested the teeth of a long saw on the top of his head. He began reciting the Japji, the morning prayer of the Sikh faith.

The saw went through his scalp within the first few strokes, blood running down into his eyes, and then through the quarter-inch of bone beneath. The accounts say the officials cut downward from head to loins and that his body fell away in two halves. They also say the prayer never stopped. Matti Das had asked to face his guru while he died, and he did, reciting the Japji until he had no mouth left to say it.

The method used on Matti Das was among the oldest and most widespread forms of execution in human history. For more than two thousand years, in places as distant as Jerusalem, Rome, Delhi, Morocco, and Japan, the carpenter’s saw was set against living people. Unlike the headsman’s axe or the sword, it was not meant to be quick. Speed was the point of most executions, or at least the excuse.

A saw has no edge in that sense. Its teeth are small chisels, each one bent slightly away from its neighbor, and every stroke digs in and rips loose a chip of whatever it passes through. Wet muscle clogs the teeth far worse than green timber, so the men on the handles have to lean in harder. Each stroke drags red pulp out of the cut.

When the teeth reach bone, a pale grit comes out mixed into it. The way the body was arranged decided how long the dying took. The version most familiar from woodcuts and torture museums has the victim hanging upside down by the ankles with the legs spread apart while two men work a saw downward from the groin. That picture belongs mostly to the story of Simon the Zealot.

In written accounts, the more common setup was a board. The condemned was strapped flat to a plank or clamped between two of them, and the saw went through wood and body together. Morocco did it that way, and so did the rebels in Haiti. The boards solved a practical problem.

A body hanging free flinches and swings away from the teeth. A saw needs something rigid to bite into, and a person lashed between planks cannot move at all. The cut from the groin was the one designed to last. The saw goes in between the legs, destroying the genitals and the skin behind them within the first minute or two.

Then the teeth reach the front of the pelvis, which parts more quickly than bone because it is held together by a pad of cartilage. The bladder empties the moment it is opened. The blade works into the sacrum, the thick wedge of bone at the base of the spine, and the men sawing feel the difference in their arms the way you feel a knot in a plank. The largest blood vessels feeding the legs run a few inches to either side of the center line, so a saw kept dead center misses them.

The bleeding is heavy from hundreds of smaller vessels, but nothing has been opened that will empty a person in minutes. Meanwhile, the victim hangs head down, blood running toward the brain instead of away from it. The aorta, the main artery coming down from the heart, forks into two branches for the legs at almost exactly the height of the navel. Once the teeth reach that fork, the bleeding is of a different order.

An adult holds about five liters of blood. Lose half and the heart stops, which is why the old accounts say the condemned stayed conscious until the saw reached the navel, sometimes the chest. Starting from the head was a different death. The saw is through the scalp in a stroke or two, into the skull within seconds, and the brain lies directly underneath.

Nobody stays conscious long with steel teeth moving through the brain. The men who did this work knew it. When the crew in Morocco set the blade on the skull of a governor named Melik in 1705, his enemies stopped them and demanded they begin between his legs instead. If it began at the head, they reasoned, he would die too quickly.

The earliest recorded case, at least in the telling, belongs to Jerusalem in the seventh century BC. King Manasseh reigned for fifty-five years, longer than any other king of Judah, and the Bible has almost nothing good to say about him. According to the book of Kings, he shed so much innocent blood that he filled Jerusalem with it from one end to the other. Kings does not name the dead.

Later traditions supplied one name, and it belonged to the most famous man in the city. The prophet Isaiah had been prophesying since before Manasseh’s grandfather wore the crown. The oldest full account of his death is a text called the Martyrdom of Isaiah, and it says he was sawn in half with a wooden saw. That phrase has puzzled people for a long time.

It may be a slip in translation for a saw used on wood, or the author may have meant exactly what he wrote. A saw made of wood has no proper teeth. It would wear its way through by friction, the way a rope wears a groove into the stone rim of a well. Taken literally, an old man was rubbed in two.

While it is happening, a false prophet stands in front of him and offers him a way out. Say that the ways of Manasseh are good, he tells him, and I will make the king and the princes and all the people bow down to you. Isaiah is partway through his own body at this point. His answer is a single line that has outlasted the rest of the book.

You can take nothing from me, he says, except the skin of my body. The last thing the book describes is his face. His eyes were open, but he did not see the men around him. He did not cry out and he did not weep.

His lips kept moving, speaking until the saw had gone all the way through. The rabbis told it differently, and their version has the tree. When Manasseh puts the same contradiction to the prophet, Isaiah speaks one of the names of God, and a cedar tree opens and closes around him. They bring the cedar in and they saw it, two men on a long saw working through a trunk as they had done a thousand times.

One old commentary says the prophet’s blood came spurting out of the wood. The Talmud says that when the blade reached his mouth, Isaiah died. Decades earlier, in the vision that made him a prophet, he had called his own nation a people of unclean lips. The saw found the lips that said it.

Early Christians knew the Isaiah story well. The letter to the Hebrews has a famous roll call of the faithful who suffered, and in among the stonings and the swords sits a single Greek word that the King James translators turned into four. They were sawn asunder. Nearly everyone who has studied that line thinks the writer had Isaiah in mind.

From then on, Isaiah was the man with the saw. Medieval painters show him standing calmly with a carpenter’s frame saw balanced on top of his head or already split to the waist. The saw was biblical. Kings had used it, and good kings at that.

The Persians had a sawn king of their own, and theirs was older still. His name was Jamshed, and in the oldest Persian scriptures he rules the world in its first golden age, before winter and before death. In the Shahnameh, the poet Ferdowsi gathered Iran’s legends into an epic around the year 1010 and gave him a reign of seven hundred years. Jamshed teaches people to weave cloth and forge iron and builds a throne studded with jewels.

Then he tells his nobles that everything good in the world came from him, so they had better start calling him the creator. The royal glory that marked him as God’s chosen king departs from him that same day. He runs and hides for a hundred years, and in the hundredth year he is spotted on the shore of the sea of China. His enemy has him seized and, in Ferdowsi’s words, sawn in two so that the world was freed of him.

When the Greeks started writing about the actual Persian court, they found the royal family still fond of cutting people in half. Herodotus tells one about Xerxes on his way to invade Greece in 480 BC. A rich old Lydian named Pytheus had entertained the entire Persian army at his own expense and offered the king his whole fortune besides. Then he came back with a favor to ask.

He had five sons, and all five were marching with the army. Could the eldest stay home to look after him? Xerxes had the eldest son found and cut in two at the waist. One half of the body was set on the right side of the road and the other half on the left, and the army marched out between them.

It was a ritual, an old purification for an army setting out, and Persia had kept it for centuries. Rome had the saw as well, and for a long time kept it in the cupboard. The oldest Roman law code, the Twelve Tables from about 450 BC, dealt with a man who owed money to several people and could not pay any of them. After a fixed number of days in chains and three trips to the market, the law said this.

On the third market day, let them cut shares of the debtor, his body divided among his creditors in proportion to what he owed each. Six hundred years later, a Roman writer recorded a dinner table argument about that clause. One guest calls it savage beyond belief. Another defends it, saying nobody was ever actually carved up under it, and that was the idea.

The law was made so frightful that nobody would dare be caught by it. The old Romans wrote a dismemberment into their founding law and took a certain pride in never having needed it. Then came the emperors. Caligula became emperor in the year 37 at twenty-four years old.

For a few months, Rome adored him. Then he fell seriously ill, recovered, and something in him had changed, or simply stopped pretending. The saw comes in a single sentence in a list. Many men of honorable rank, Suetonius says, were first branded on the face with hot irons, sent to the mines or thrown to the wild animals in the arena, and some he had sawn through the middle.

Caligula liked his killing slow. His standing instruction to executioners was to strike so that the man could feel he was dying. He lasted not quite four years. Officers of his own guard stabbed him in a palace corridor.

About seventy-five years later, the saw appears in Roman history a second time. In the year 115, Trajan was far in the east with most of the army, and Jewish communities across the eastern Mediterranean rose in revolt. The Roman historian Cassius Dio gives the revolt one paragraph, and it is one of the most violent paragraphs in ancient literature. They ate the flesh of their victims, he says, made belts for themselves from the entrails, smeared themselves with the blood and wore the skins as clothing.

Many they sawn in two from the head downwards. Something terrible certainly happened. The next emperor had to rebuild the city at the center of the revolt, and his workmen left inscriptions saying what they were repairing. Rome’s answer was just as thorough.

By the time the legions were done, Jewish life in that region and on Cyprus had more or less ceased to exist. Christianity grew up inside that Roman world, and its early heroes were people killed by the state in public. The saw went to one of the twelve apostles. Simon the Zealot is about the least known of the Twelve, and the story that won out in the Latin West has him sawn in half lengthwise starting at the groin.

The image most people carry of this execution comes from one artist. Around 1512 in Wittenberg, Lucas Cranach the Elder cut a set of twelve wood blocks showing how each apostle died. In the Simon print, a naked man hangs head down from a crossbeam between two posts, his ankles roped far apart, two workmen on either side with a big frame saw already taken well down into his body. His arms dangle.

The men look bored, like laborers halfway through a shift. When someone today thinks of death by sawing, nine times out of ten they are thinking of Cranach’s Simon. One sawing from the early church is different. It has a year, a family, a court, and a motive.

Her name was Tarbula, and she lived in the Persian Empire in the middle of the fourth century. Persia was ruled by Shapur II, who had a large Christian minority in his western provinces. Then the Roman Empire next door turned Christian, Shapur went to war with Rome, and suddenly every Christian in Persia looked like a man who prayed for the enemy. The bishop of the capital refused to collect the double taxes imposed to fund the war and was beheaded along with about a hundred other clergy.

Tarbula was his sister, a woman who had taken a vow never to marry, living with her widowed sister and a servant girl who had taken the same vow. About a year after the bishop died, the queen of Persia fell sick, and the whisper that reached her was that the dead bishop’s sisters had caused it by sorcery in revenge for their brother. The three women were arrested. One of the judges sent a private message to Tarbula’s cell that night.

If she would sleep with him, he would see to it that she and the other two walked free. She sent back a scorching refusal and said she would take death over it gladly. The sentence was that they be sawn in two. Each woman was stretched out and bound to two stakes outside the city gates.

The magi had the sawing done themselves or stood over it. Two of them at least lay bound on the ground within earshot while the saw worked on the first. The servant girl is not named in any version. The halves were then cut again, each into three, so that every woman was now in six pieces.

The pieces were put into baskets and hung from forked poles set up in two rows on either side of the road outside the gate. Then the queen was brought out, carried or walked, sick as she was, down the road between the two rows. The magi had prescribed it. Passing between the divided bodies of the witches would draw the illness out of her and break the spell.

It is the same rite Xerxes used on the road out of Sardis eight centuries earlier. Persia had kept it all that time. The ruler whose name is tied to the saw more than any other is Mehmed the Conqueror, who took Constantinople in 1453. Wherever his armies broke into a place that had held out against him, the Christian chronicles say, someone important ended up cut in half.

The named cases begin in 1460. At a hill fort in southern Greece, the garrison surrendered, and Mehmed had the three hundred surviving defenders put to death. Their commander was set apart and sawn in half. Two years later, Mehmed’s fleet arrived off the island of Lesbos.

The lord shut himself inside the fortress and asked for terms. The terms were generous on paper. Mehmed swore that no one who surrendered would lose his head. The gates opened.

The Italian soldiers were marched off separately, about three hundred of them in one count and four hundred in another. They were laid out and sawn in half at the waist, everyone. A single sawing takes a team of men and several minutes of hard effort, and the blade has to be cleared constantly. Three hundred of them means crews working in relays through most of a day.

The sultan, it was explained, had given his word about their heads, and their heads had not been touched. Eight years later it attached itself to its most famous victim. In June of 1470, Mehmed came in person for Negroponte, the chief Venetian naval base in the Aegean. The garrison held for nearly a month and threw back four general assaults.

On the eleventh of July, a Venetian relief fleet appeared, more than seventy ships close enough for people on the walls to count them. The whole town went up onto the ramparts to cheer. All the admiral had to do was run down wind onto the bridge of boats the sultan’s engineers had built across the strait and break it. The Venetian admiral anchored and did nothing.

He wanted to wait for more galleys, and the fleet sat within sight of the town for the rest of the day. Mehmed understood what he was being given. He ordered the final assault for that night. By morning, his men were over the walls.

When resistance stopped, the sultan’s order was that every male in the town above the age of about eight was to die. In the version that Venice came to treasure, the senior Venetian commander, Paolo Erizzo, fell back into a tower and held it after everything else was lost. When their powder and food were gone, he called down that he would surrender if the sultan would guarantee his life. Mehmed sent back his oath.

Erizzo’s head would be safe. He came out. He was brought before the sultan, who gave the order that Erizzo be laid between two boards and sawn through at the waist. When the Venetian protested that he had the sultan’s sworn word, Mehmed is supposed to have answered that he had promised to spare the head and had said nothing at all about the flanks.

The sawing was done there in front of the tents. The men who were actually at Negroponte tell it a few different ways. One says the sultan cut his throat with his own hand. Another says Erizzo died in the first rush, sword in hand.

The exact circumstances remain unclear. What is certain is that the story of the sultan who kept his oaths to the letter became known in every port in the Mediterranean, and you had better listen very carefully to the letter. When the ships arrived at other harbors, the saw came with them. In 1480, an Ottoman army landed at Otranto on the heel of Italy.

The town held for two weeks. When the Turks came through the breach, much of the population had crowded into the cathedral. The archbishop was a very old man, past eighty, who had spent the night giving communion. Some reports say he was cut down where he stood with a single blow.

Others, which spread quickly through Italy, say the soldiers took him and sawn him in half. The same was said of the garrison’s commander, who had been taken wounded. Three days later, about eight hundred men of the town, every male over fifteen still alive, were taken up a hill outside the walls, offered their lives in exchange for converting, and beheaded one by one when they refused. Their skulls are still in the cathedral, stacked in rows from floor to ceiling in glass cases behind the altar.

In Japan, the punishment was written into the law code. The Japanese word is nokogiribiki. During the wars of the 1500s, Oda Nobunaga, the first of the three warlords who put Japan back together, devised a punishment for a man who had tried to kill him. In the autumn of 1573, the marksman who had fired at Nobunaga three years earlier was finally captured.

A pit was dug at the side of a road, and the man was stood in it with his arms at his sides. The earth was shoveled back and stamped down around him to the collarbones. The saw was bamboo, split and notched into rough teeth. On a human neck, it scrapes more than it cuts.

The most often repeated tradition has the man simply left there beside the road, and travelers ordered to take a turn at the saw as they passed. A claim that circulates in Japan is that he lasted six days. No document confirms the number. The next great warlord, Tokugawa Ieyasu, took it up.

In 1575, he discovered that one of his own officials was plotting to hand his home castle to his enemies. First, the official’s wife and five children were crucified, bound to wooden frames and run through with spears. He was brought to watch it done. Then he was paraded through the streets.

At the end of the route at a crossroads, the pit was ready. He was buried to the neck. The fingers were cut from his hands first and laid in a row on the ground in front of his face. A bamboo saw and an iron one were set beside him, and the people of the town were told to use them.

The memoir says they did. Anyone going by took hold and pulled, townsmen and travelers alike. When the wars ended, the Tokugawa turned all of this into written law. In 1742, the criminal law was gathered into a single secret code.

At the very top of the death penalties, reserved for a single offense, sat nokogiribiki. The offense was killing your master. Article 71 of the code lays out the sequence. The place was the open ground at the southern foot of Nihonbashi, the bridge of Japan, where every main highway in the country was measured from.

A box was built, three feet across and two and a half deep, sunk in the ground until its rim was level with the surface. The condemned was put into it kneeling. A wooden board with a hole cut in it was fitted over the top and locked around the neck, so passersby saw a head resting on the ground as if it had been set there on a tray. An official drew a sword and made a cut on each shoulder just deep enough to bleed properly.

The blood was collected and smeared along the teeth of a bamboo saw. That saw and a second one of iron were stood upright in the ground on either side of the head. The condemned stayed in the box for two days, hauled out at dusk and put back at dawn. On the third day came the parade to the execution ground, where the prisoner was tied to a cross and killed by spears.

The code then adds a sentence. If there is any person who wishes to saw, he is to be allowed to saw. In the early years of the dynasty, the invitation had been meant and it had been taken up. By 1742, it had become stage property.

The blood on the bamboo was the government’s way of saying this person is being sawn without anyone having to do it. No executioner touched the saw. Guards were posted beside the box around the clock, and their job in effect was to stand next to the saw and make sure nobody accepted the law’s offer. That arrangement lasted about two hundred years.

In 1868, the shogunate fell. The new government was in a great hurry to look modern in the eyes of the foreign powers anchored in its harbors, and public torture was high on the list of things to be tidied away. On the eighth of July 1869, a directive from the new justice office struck nokogiribiki from the list of punishments. The sentence about letting anyone saw who wished to was never amended in all that time.

It stood in the code word for word until the day the whole code was thrown out, with a guard beside the box to prevent it. And that is where the trail runs out. The saw was used on saints and sinners, kings and prophets, rebels and slaves, in every corner of the world, for more than two thousand years. The last thing the code’s final offering leaves us with is a person kneeling in a box at the foot of a bridge, a bamboo saw red with blood standing in the ground beside them, and a stranger who crouches down in the dust, takes up the notched strip of bamboo, and draws it across the side of the neck.

The person in the box cannot raise a hand or duck. All they can do is turn their face the other way, and that offers the saw the other side.