Skull Fractures Suggest Egypt's First Kings Had Attendants Killed

A fresh forensic look at skulls from the burial grounds of Egypt's earliest kings points to deliberate killing, according to ScienceDaily, which summarized the study on behalf of the journal Frontiers. Researchers found signs of potentially fatal head injuries in 18 of 46 skulls, which suggests that members of the royal household may have been put to death when a king died.

The finding offers physical support for an idea that archaeologists have debated for more than a century: that people buried around the First Dynasty kings were sacrificed to keep serving them in the afterlife.

The key numbers

5,000 years: the approximate age of the royal tombs at Abydos, Egypt, where First Dynasty kings were buried. The earliest kings of a unified Egypt built these complexes around 3000 BCE.
46 skulls: the number examined by Dr. Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University, who found them in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University.
18 skulls: those showing substantial cranial trauma, mostly linear fractures.
39%: the share of the individuals studied who may have been deliberately killed. The researchers describe this as a minimum.

How the evidence was missed for a century

Archaeologist Flinders Petrie dug at Abydos in the 1920s and noticed that unusually large numbers of people had been buried around the kings. Some royal burial sites were surrounded by hundreds of small graves laid out in rows. Petrie suspected the people in them had been sacrificed, but he could not find clear signs of violent death.

He reburied most of the human remains, though he kept a selection of skulls, some of which went to the United Kingdom. Campbell, who led the new work published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, revisited those skulls with modern forensic methods. She said the cracks that Petrie apparently read as damage from natural processes can be identified as perimortem injuries, meaning they happened around the time of death.

Campbell said the linear fractures would likely have caused rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding and death. She also reported sharp-force trauma on some of the 18 skulls, including a chopping injury to one person's eye.

Who the people in the small graves were

Campbell described each subsidiary burial as a simple chamber in a row of dozens of others. Some people had a simple coffin, and most had a few grave goods such as ceramic vessels. Many graves also held small objects, including copper tools, projectile points or small ivory figurines.

Petrie found a few grave markers with names and sometimes official titles. According to Campbell, those titles mostly point to lower- or mid-level officials and artisans.

She explained that retainer sacrifice is a form of human sacrifice in which people close to a ruler are killed when the ruler dies. In many cultures it reflects a belief that they will keep serving the ruler in an afterlife, she said, but it can also be a striking display of the ruler's power. Some retainers might have volunteered, while others may have been chosen or even forced.

Why it matters

The study gives a century-old question its first physical evidence. It also shifts attention to people who are usually left out of the story of Egypt's founding kings. Campbell said she was drawn to these retainers partly because they are mostly relegated to footnotes, and she asked who they were and how they saw their own role in a ruler's life and death.

The results come with limits. The injuries show that some of these people probably died violently, but the exact circumstances of the deaths remain uncertain, and the evidence comes from the 46 skulls that survive rather than from every person buried at Abydos. The research does not settle whether any individual volunteered or was forced.

What comes next

Campbell is the author of a forthcoming book, State-sanctioned Violence and Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt, to be published by Routledge Press.

Around Prague, based on reporting by ScienceDaily

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