Skull fractures suggest servants of Egypt’s ancient kings were sacrificed — SkimNews
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- Dr. Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University re-examined 46 skulls of retainers from the Duckworth Collections at Cambridge, originally excavated from graves surrounding the tombs of Kings Djer, Djet, and Queen Merneith at the Umm el-Qa'ab royal cemetery near Abydos.
- Eighteen of the 46 skulls showed signs of potentially lethal trauma, including fractures and one chopping injury to the eye — findings Campbell published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
- The fractures are unlikely to have been caused by the ceremonial maces commonly depicted in Egyptian art, and were more likely inflicted with flat, wide objects made of wood or antler, Campbell reported.
- Flinders Petrie excavated the retainer graves in the 1920s and likely saw the skull damage but misinterpreted it as post-mortem rather than perimortem — which is why earlier scholars concluded retainers were either buried alive or died naturally and were later reburied.
- Campbell cautioned that the small sample size makes certainty impossible: "It's quite possible that some of the retainers were sacrificed, while others were not."
- The practice of retainer sacrifice appears to have been short-lived — subsidiary graves tapered off and disappeared by the start of the Second Dynasty, when statuettes replaced human servants.
- Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo called the paper one of the few to apply rigorous current methodologies to the remains, and Dr. Dawn McCormack of Samford University said the scenes would have been "very gruesome" and that some retainers were likely not compliant.
Why it matters: Campbell's study is the first rigorous bioarchaeological analysis of Abydos retainer remains, giving Egyptologists direct physical evidence for a practice previously inferred only from art and grave layout. The finding concretely anchors the timeline of retainer sacrifice — beginning in the First Dynasty and ending when statuettes replaced human servants in the Second Dynasty — sharpening how the earliest pharaohs expressed royal power in death.
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