KYPHONISMS, or CYPHONISMS, an ancient punishment frequently undergone by the martyrs in the primitive times, wherein the body of the sufferer was anointed with honey, and so exposed to the sun, that the flies and wasps might be tempted to torment him. This was performed in three ways. Sometimes they only tied the patient to a stake; at other times they hoisted him up into the air, and suspended him in a basket; and at others, again, stretched him out on the ground with his hands tied behind him. The word is originally Greek, and comes from *κυφός*, which signifies either the *stake* to which the patient was tied, the *collar* fitted to his neck, or the *instrument* with which they tormented him. The scholiast on Aristophanes says it was a wooden lock, or cage, and that it was called so from *κυφός*, to bend, because it kept the tortured in a bent posture; but others take the *κυφός* for a log of wood laid over the criminal's head, to prevent his standing upright; and Hesychius describes it as a piece of wood on which criminals were stretched and tormented. In effect, it is probable the word might signify all these several things. It was a generic term, and these were merely the species. Suidas gives us the fragment of an old law, which punished those who treated the laws contemptuously with kyphonism for the space of twenty days; after which they were precipitated from a rock, dressed in women's habit.

**KYRAUT**, a district of Northern Hindustan, situated between the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth degrees of north latitude. It is bounded on the north by the Himalaya ridge, on the east by Bootan, on the south by Morung, and on the west by Nepaul, from which it is separated by a large tract little known to Europeans. The river Teesta is the principal river, and Damsong the chief town. It was conquered in 1769 by the rajah of Gorcah.