Skull fractures add forensic evidence for retainer sacrifice in Egypt’s First Dynasty

The cemetery contains the tombs and enclosures of First Dynasty rulers and dates as far back as 3,000 BC. Around these structures are graves thought to belong to people associated with the royal households, including ladies, seal-bearers, inspectors and artisans. Aha, the first ruler of the First Dynasty, appears to have had only a few subsidiary burials, while his successors had hundreds of subsidiary graves around their tombs and enclosures.

The retainers’ graves were excavated in the 1920s by the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who believed they were an example of human sacrifice, a view some later experts shared. But Petrie found no evidence of trauma on the remains. He suggested the individuals may have been buried alive; others proposed that the retainers died naturally and were later reburied at Abydos when their ruler died.

Roselyn Campbell, a bioarchaeologist at Purdue University and author of the study, re-examined skulls of 46 retainers excavated from graves surrounding the funerary enclosures of King Djer, King Djet and Queen Merneith, from the Duckworth Collections at the University of Cambridge. She reports that 18 of the skulls showed signs of potentially lethal trauma, such as fractures and, in one case, a chopping injury to the eye.

Campbell believes Petrie may have seen the skull fractures but did not realize they were injuries that occurred around the time of death rather than later damage. The fractures are unlikely to have been caused by a mace, a weapon often depicted in ancient Egyptian art as being used by a victorious king to smite his enemies, she adds. They are more likely to have been caused by flat, wide objects made of wood or antler.

“This question of whether or not retainer sacrifice was practised in Egypt has been debated for over a century, but this is the first study to examine the human remains from the tombs themselves,” Campbell told The Guardian. She also said that for the crania without trauma, it cannot be certain they were sacrificed. “It’s quite possible that some of the retainers were sacrificed, while others were not,” she said. With such a small sample size of the original burial population, she added, researchers cannot see the full extent of these funerary rituals or be sure the sample is truly representative of all retainers.

Campbell noted that the number of subsidiary graves tapered off quickly and seems to have disappeared with the beginning of the Second Dynasty. Ars Technica reported that over one-third of the skulls showed evidence of blunt force trauma. Campbell told Ars Technica that people tend to fall into one of two camps on retainer sacrifice: either it definitely happened or it definitely did not, but nobody had looked at the bones in a very long time. Forensic science has advanced considerably over the last century, though older sets of remains are often incomplete or modified for preservation, destroying vital forensic information.

Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo, said that while the idea of retainer sacrifice was not totally new, the paper is one of the few times rigorous current methodologies have been used to evaluate these remains. She said the practice was short-lived, with people being replaced by statuettes. Possibly some or all retainers felt it was a boon and that they would enjoy eternal life in the service of the god-king, though they might also have resented it, been terrified and tried to escape that fate.

Dawn McCormack, an Egyptologist at Samford University in Alabama, said similar sacrifices had occurred across different cultures and times, adding that not everyone at the Egyptian site may have been compliant. “If you really think about what those scenes would have looked like, it would have been very gruesome,” she said. While noting that the study involved only a small number of skulls from the burial site, she said the idea that some people may have been violently killed is something we might expect in reality.