By an extension of the like precaution kings are sometimes forbidden ever to leave their palaces; or, if they are allowed to do so, their subjects are forbidden to see them abroad. We have seen that the priestly king at Shark Point, West Africa, may never quit his house or even his chair, in which he is obliged to sleep sitting.[1] After his coronation the King of Loango is confined to his palace, which he may not leave.[2] The King of Ibo (West Africa) “does not step out of his house into the town unless a human sacrifice is made to propitiate the gods: on this account he never goes out beyond the precincts of his premises.”[3] The kings of Aethiopia were worshipped as gods, but were mostly kept shut up in their palaces.[4] The kings of Sabaea (Sheba), the spice country of Arabia, were not allowed to go out of their palaces; if they did so, the mob stoned them to death.[5] But at the top of the palace there was a window with a chain attached to it. It any man deemed he had suffered wrong, he pulled the chain, and the king perceived him and called him in and gave judgment.[6] So to this day the kings of Corea, whose persons are sacred and receive “honours almost divine,” are shut up in their palace from the age of twelve or fifteen; and if a suitor wishes to obtain justice of the king he sometimes lights a great bonfire on a mountain facing the palace; the king sees the fire and informs himself of the case.[7] The
- ↑ See above, p. 112.
- ↑ Bastian, Die Loango-Küste, i. 263. However, a case is recorded in which he marched out to war (ib. i. 268 sq.)
- ↑ S. Crowther and J. C. Taylor, The Gospel on the Banks of the Niger, p. 433. On p. 379 mention is made of the king’s “annual appearance to the public,” but this may have taken place within “the precincts of his premises.”
- ↑ Strabo, xvii. 2, 2, σέβονται δ’ ὡς θεοὐς τοὺς βασιλέας κατακλείστους ὄντας καὶ οὶκουροὺς τὸ πλέον.
- ↑ Strabo, xvi. 4, 19; Diodorus Siculus, iii. 47.
- ↑ Heraclides Cumanus in Athenaeus, 517 B.C.
- ↑ Ch. Dallet, Histoire de l’Église de Corée (Paris, 1874), i. xxiv-xxvi. The king sometimes, though rarely,
