New Research Shows That These Ancient Egyptian Servants May Have Been Brutally Sacrificed and Buried Alongside Their Pharaohs

Five thousand years ago, some of ancient Egypt’s first royals were laid to rest in grand tombs, accompanied by hundreds of their courtiers. Archaeologists have long puzzled over this arrangement. But a new forensic study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology suggests that these servants may have been prematurely dispatched to the afterlife, where they could serve their rulers for all eternity.

Study author Roselyn Campbell, a bioarchaeologist at Purdue University, analyzed 46 skulls from Umm el-Qaab, a royal cemetery in Abydos, where Egypt’s first pharaohs were interred. The famed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie first excavated these skulls back in the 1920s, when he discovered hundreds of graves surrounding Abydos’ royal tombs. Reasoning that these retainers (court officials and servants) likely didn’t die of natural causes simultaneously, Petrie suspected they had been sacrificed.

But he couldn’t find physical evidence of murder to back up his hunch. The ancient city was also a key pilgrimage site in ancient Egypt dedicated to the worship of Osiris, god of the afterlife and the dead. Campbell has now reassessed some of the preserved skulls using modern forensic methods.

She found that 18 of the 46 crania had suffered significant trauma, suggesting that these individuals were “deliberately killed by blows to the head,” per a statement from Frontiers. The retainers were interred in rows of simple “subsidiary burials” surrounding the funerary enclosures of three royals: King Djer (the third pharaoh of Egypt’s First Dynasty, who ruled around 3000 B.C.E.) and two of his successors, King Djet and Queen Meretneith. Others may have been chosen or even forced.” The wounds that Campbell identified include multiple linear fractures across cranial vaults, a “penetrative injury” to the side of a head and a “chopping injury” to an eye, per the study.

The individuals without skull injuries may have died naturally. Or maybe they were killed via methods such as asphyxiation, which wouldn’t have left skeletal marks for archaeologists to find. Nobody knows what kinds of weapons the ancient Egyptians used to cause the skull injuries.

According to the study, the first king of the First Dynasty, Aha, was buried with a few subsidiaries. Djer, Djet and Meretneith were then buried with hundreds, clearly taking retainer sacrifice to new heights. But by the beginning of Egypt’s Second Dynasty, around 2730 B.C.E., subsidiary graves had all but disappeared.