After that the Minister says, “You, Sir, will marry the Princess; you will give the Minister’s work to the Prince. Because of that.”
After that, the King ordered them to hang the Minister.
The King married that Princess. [The Prince] having gone to the Prince’s [own] palace, took the kingship from the Minister [who had been ruling temporarily]. To the Minister he gave the Minister’s work [again].
Finished.
North-western Province.
With regard to the order to hang the Prince, and the subsequent hanging of the Minister, there is a reference to this punishment in the next story, in which a Minister recommends that a turtle which had frightened some Princesses should be hanged. In vol. i, p. 368, a jackal remarked that a leopard which had been caught in a noose had been “hanged,” as though this were a well-known punishment. I think there is no other clear instance in these stories; but in vol. i, p. 189, a Prince found a Yaksanī trying to eat a dead body which was hanging in a tree; if this had been a case of suicide the relatives might have removed the body. Hanging the body at the four gates of the city after quartering it is mentioned in two of these tales (vol. i, pp. 86 and 89, and in No. 80, p. 20 of the present volume). Hanging is not referred to in the stories of the Low-Country Sinhalese, where one might expect to meet with it.
In the Wēvaelkaeṭiya Inscription (Epigraphia Zeylanica, vol. i, p. 250), King Mahinda IV. (A.D. 1026–1042) ordered that persons convicted of robbery with violence should be hanged. Mr. Wickremasinghe in giving a translation of this inscription added a note to the effect that he had not found this punishment mentioned elsewhere in Sinhalese literature; but in the Mahāvansa, ii, lxxv, vv. 166 and 196, and in the Rājāvaliya (translation), p. 66, there are accounts of the hanging of people. In Marshall’s Ceylon, p. 39, it is stated that “the punishment of death was usually carried into effect by hanging, or being killed by elephants.” In Davy’s work also, p. 182, it is said that “the sentence of death, in cases of murder, was carried into effect by hanging.”
In the Kathā Sarit Sāgara (Tawney), vol. ii, p. 185, a young man who was in love with a Princess received her portrait from a painter, and “spent his time in gazing on, coaxing and touching, and adorning her picture; … he seemed to see her, though she was only a painted figure, talking to him and kissing him, … and he was contented, because the whole world was for him contained in that piece of painted canvas.”
In the Arabian Nights (Lady Burton’s ed., vol. i, p. 183), when a Wazīr showed his young son to a Sultan, the latter was so much pleased with him that he said, “O Wazīr, thou must needs bring him daily to my presence.”