Scientists examining 46 ancient skulls from Abydos, Egypt, have identified significant head trauma in 18 of the crania, providing physical support for a century-old theory that the country’s earliest rulers practiced retainer sacrifice.
First Dynasty rulers built elaborate burial complexes around 3000 BCE at Abydos, constructing royal tombs alongside rows of smaller subsidiary graves. When archaeologist Flinders Petrie excavated these subsidiary chambers in the 1920s, he suspected that household members had been killed to accompany their rulers in death, but he failed to find physical evidence of fatal wounds.
Dr. Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University located 46 of those preserved skulls in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University and reassessed them using modern forensic knowledge. The examination revealed that approximately 39 percent of the individuals studied displayed potentially deadly perimortem cranial trauma.
“The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death,” said Campbell, whose research was published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
Campbell is also the author of the forthcoming book State-sanctioned Violence and Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt (Routledge Press). Some of the 18 injured skulls also displayed evidence of sharp-force trauma, including a chopping injury to one individual’s eye.
“Retainer sacrifice is a type of human sacrifice where those close to a ruler are killed when the ruler dies,” Campbell explained.
Petrie kept meticulous excavation records but reburied most of the skeletal remains, retaining skulls and sending some to the United Kingdom. The recovered crania came from subsidiary graves surrounding the funerary enclosures of early rulers including Djer, Djet, and Merneith.
Petrie found a few grave markers that had names and sometimes official titles on them. The titles seem to mostly refer to lower- or mid-level officials as well as artisans. Most subsidiary graves contained simple coffins alongside modest grave goods such as ceramic vessels, copper tools, projectile points, or small ivory figurines.
“Each subsidiary burial was a simple chamber in a row of dozens of others,” said Campbell.
While ancient Egyptian kings are often depicted striking their enemies with a mace, the linear fractures found on the retainers do not match the depressed fractures typically caused by mace impacts. Such linear breaks generally result from a broad, flat weapon or a fall, though fatal falls would have left skeletal damage that should have appeared in Petrie’s photographs or notes.
“If I had unlimited resources, I would love to figure out where the bodies of these individuals might be and analyze them!” Campbell said.
“Still, this study shows how much new information about the past can be revealed when we revisit previous data armed with updated methods and knowledge, even for datasets that are incomplete and imperfect like this one,” Campbell added.