Egypt’s earliest kings were buried with hundreds of servants; 100 years later, skull fractures are reviving the theory that some were sacrificed | World News

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Skull fractures found on remains from the royal cemetery at Umm el-Qa’ab near Abydos suggest that servants of Egypt’s earliest kings may have been sacrificed when their rulers died. A new study by bioarchaeologist Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University, published on 5 October 2026 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology and reported by Nicola Davis in The Guardian, re-examined skulls first excavated a century ago. Eighteen of forty-six skulls showed injuries consistent with death around the time of burial. The findings appear to support a theory proposed by the pioneering Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, though the evidence remains incomplete.

How forensic bioarchaeology reexamined skulls from the First Dynasty royal cemetery at Abydos, Egypt

According to the study ‘New data from old bones: using bioarchaeology and forensics to reassess legacy data from ancient Abydos, Egypt’ in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, the royal cemetery at Umm el-Qa’ab holds the tombs and funerary enclosures of the First Dynasty kings, who ruled roughly five thousand years ago. Around those structures lie hundreds of smaller graves, which scholars believe belonged to court officials, craftspeople and other members of the royal household. The Guardian reports that these graves also include people described as ladies, seal-bearers and inspectors.Flinders Petrie excavated many of these graves in the 1920s. Campbell tracked down forty-six skulls from the graves surrounding the funerary enclosures of King Djer, King Djet and Queen Merneith. They are held in the Duckworth Collection at the University of Cambridge. Campbell told The Guardian that the question of retainer sacrifice has been debated for more than a century, but that hers is the first study to examine the human remains from the tombs themselves.

Eighteen of forty-six crania exhibit potentially lethal fractures and one injury to the eye

Campbell reports that eighteen of the forty-six skulls, about thirty-nine per cent, showed injuries from around the time of death. The most common were linear fractures across the top of the skull. There were also several sharp-force injuries, including a wound that penetrated the side of the head and a chopping injury to the eye. Campbell explains in the paper that linear fractures of this kind often cause bleeding inside the skull, which can lead to unconsciousness and death without surgery.The injuries do not match the famous image of a king smashing enemies with a mace. A stone mace would have caused depressed fractures, which are dents in the bone. Instead, the linear fractures are more consistent with flat, wide objects made of wood or antler. The paper also notes that injuries above the line where a hat brim would sit tend to come from deliberate blows rather than accidental falls.

Why Flinders Petrie missed the evidence of human sacrifice during his excavations of the royal tombs

Petrie suspected that so many people could not have died naturally at the same time, yet he reported no signs of trauma on the bones. He even suggested that some individuals might have been stunned and buried alive. Campbell argues that Petrie probably did see the cracks but took them for damage caused by the burial environment over time. As evidence, she points to the paraffin wax he applied to stabilise the skulls, which often surrounds the fractures.Modern forensic science can tell injuries made around the time of death from damage made long afterwards, because fresh bone breaks differently from dry bone. The study also finds that the way the skeletons lay does not clearly support burial alive. It further finds that the well-preserved small bones of the hands and feet argue against the theory that the bodies were moved from earlier graves.

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What experts say about retainer sacrifice and the limits of such a small skull sample

Campbell is careful about what the evidence can prove. She told The Guardian that for skulls without trauma, sacrifice cannot be confirmed, and that some retainers may have been sacrificed while others were not. The surviving skulls are only a small fraction of the original burial populations, which the study estimates at between five and fifteen per cent at each enclosure. Many of the other bones were lost or reburied together.Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo, also welcomed the idea, saying the idea was not entirely new but that the paper is one of the few to apply rigorous current methods to these remains. She suggested that some retainers might have welcomed an eternal life serving a god-king, while others could have been terrified and tried to escape. Dawn McCormack, an Egyptologist at Samford University in Alabama, said similar sacrifices happened in other cultures and eras, and that such scenes would have been very gruesome. She added that not everyone may have gone willingly.

Why the practice ended so quickly in later Egyptian tombs

The number of servant graves around royal tombs dropped quickly and seems to disappear with the start of the Second Dynasty, according to Campbell. Ikram told The Guardian the practice was short-lived because people were replaced by statuettes in later periods.Campbell’s paper places the finding in a wider context. At the royal cemetery of Ur in ancient Mesopotamia, modern computed tomography scans overturned an earlier belief that attendants had peacefully drunk poison, revealing severe blunt force injuries to the skull instead. At Kerma in Nubia, researchers found no clear trauma but still considered sacrifice the most likely explanation. The Abydos study argues that other long-stored excavation collections deserve fresh examination with modern methods.