When did hanging emerge as a form of capital punishment?
score:11
Book 22 of the Homeric Odyssey contains a rather graphic description of how Telemachus hanged his father’s unfaithful maidservants. The Odyssey is of course a work of fiction, but it is reasonable to see this passage as evidence for the use of hanging as a judicial punishment at that time. Current scholarship puts the Homeric poems between 750 and 600 BC.
Here is relevant passage in Butler's translation:
Then when they had made the whole place quite clean and orderly, they took the women out and hemmed them in the narrow space between the wall of the domed room and that of the yard, so that they could not get away: and Telemakhos said to the other two, "I shall not let these women die a clean death, for they were insolent to me and my mother, and used to sleep with the suitors."
So saying he made a ship's cable fast to one of the bearing-posts that supported the roof of the domed room, and secured it all around the building, at a good height, lest any of the women's feet should touch the ground; and as thrushes or doves beat against a net that has been set for them in a thicket just as they were getting to their nest, and a terrible fate awaits them, even so did the women have to put their heads in nooses one after the other and die most miserably. Their feet moved convulsively for a while, but not for very long.
Upvote:1
Primitive Norse and Germanic Cultures used ritual hanging to dedicate prisoners to the Gods, Odin or Wotan.
From Wikipedia: Odin
Worship among the Germans
Human sacrifices were very frequently offered to Odin, especially prisoners taken in battle. The most common method of sacrifice was by hanging the victim on a tree; and in the poem Hdvamfil the god himself is represented as sacrificed in this way. The worship of Odin seems to have prevailed chiefly, if not solely, in military circles, i.e. among princely families and the retinues of warriors attached to them. It is probable, however, that the worship of Odin was once common to most of the Teutonic peoples.
Owing to the very small amount of information which has come down to us regarding the gods of ancient England and Germany, it cannot be determined how far the character and adventures attributed to Odin in Scandinavian mythology were known to other Teutonic peoples. From Woden also most of the anglo-Saxon royal families traced their descent.
Upvote:2
The first recorded use of judicial hanging is in the Persian Empire approximately 2,500 years ago.2 [New World Encyclopedia]1
(Aside: Note that the reference is to " Richard Clark"The process of judicial hanging", Capital Punishment U.K. Retrieved April 15, 2007.", which is not currently available; you might want to check the wayback machine)
Mosaic Law codified many capital crimes. In fact, there is evidence that Jews used many different techniques including stoning, hanging, beheading, crucifixion (copied from the Romans), throwing the criminal from a rock, and sawing asunder. PBS
PBS does not attach a date to "Mosaic Law"
The Oxford English Dictionary states that hanging in this sense is "specifically to put to death by suspension by the neck", though it formerly also referred to crucifixion and death by impalement in which the body would remain "hanging". wikipedia
I suspect, based on the OED reference in wikipedia and on the two quotes listed that hanging goes back as far as human law, but the definition of hanging might not be precise.
Update OP clarified that he is looking for primary source material.
Eyewitness to history cites
This eyewitness account appears in: de Saussure, Cesar, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II (1902), reprinted in: Charles-Edwards, T. and B. Richardson, They Saw it Happen, An Anthology of Eyewitness's Accounts of Events in British History 1689-1897 (1958); Gatrell, V.I.C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (1994).
The Proceedings of the Old Bailey documents the hanging of Jack Sheppard in 1724. This is the earliest primary source I've found so far.
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