Nicola Davis
Science correspondent
THE GUARDIAN
Sun, October 4, 2026
A fresco depicting a funeral procession in ancient Egypt.Photograph: DEA/F Guenet/De Agostini/Getty Images
Court officials and craftspeople serving early Egyptian kings may have been sacrificed when their ruler died, according to research that found fractures in several ancient skulls.
The royal cemetery of Umm el-Qa'ab near Abydos features the tombs and enclosures of the First Dynasty rulers of Egypt, and dates as far back as 3,000BC.
Not only royalty were buried at the site: surrounding these structures are graves thought to belong to people associated with the royal households – including ladies, seal-bearers, inspectors and artisans.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, Dr Roselyn Campbell, author of the study from Purdue University in the US, notes: "While Aha, the first ruler of the First Dynasty, seems to have only had a few subsidiary burials, his successors included hundreds of subsidiary graves around their tombs and enclosures."
The graves of the retainers were excavated in the 1920s by the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who believed them to be an example of human sacrifice – a view some later experts agreed with.
But there was a snag: Petrie did not find any evidence of trauma on the remains. While he suggested the individuals may have been buried alive, others suggested the retainers died naturally and were later reburied at Abydos when their ruler died.
Campbell re-examined the skulls of 46 retainers excavated from graves surrounding the funerary enclosures of three different royals – King Djer, King Djet, and Queen Merneith – from the Duckworth Collections at the University of Cambridge.
"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.
Campbell 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 believs Petrie may have seen the skull fractures but did not realise they were injuries that occurred around the time of death, rather than arising as a result of later damage.
The fractures, she adds, 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. Instead they are more likely to have been caused by flat, wide objects made of wood or antler.
"For the crania without trauma, we 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, we simply can't see the full extent of these funerary rituals, nor can we be sure that this sample is truly representative of all the retainers."
Campbell noted the number of subsidiary graves tapered off quickly and seems to have disappeared with the beginning of the Second Dynasty.
Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo, said while the idea of retainer sacrifice was not totally new, "this paper is one of the few times that rigorous current methodologies are being used to evaluate these remains".
She added: "The practice was short-lived, with people being replaced by statuettes. Possibly some or all retainers felt that this was a boon and that they would enjoy an eternal life in the service of the god-king, though they might also have resented it, been terrified, and tried to escape this fate."
Dr Dawn McCormack, an Egyptologist at Samford University, 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 only involved a small number of skulls from the burial site, "the idea that some of the people may have been violently killed, I think, is something that in reality we might expect", she said.
Sun, October 4, 2026
A fresco depicting a funeral procession in ancient Egypt.Photograph: DEA/F Guenet/De Agostini/Getty Images
Court officials and craftspeople serving early Egyptian kings may have been sacrificed when their ruler died, according to research that found fractures in several ancient skulls.
The royal cemetery of Umm el-Qa'ab near Abydos features the tombs and enclosures of the First Dynasty rulers of Egypt, and dates as far back as 3,000BC.
Not only royalty were buried at the site: surrounding these structures are graves thought to belong to people associated with the royal households – including ladies, seal-bearers, inspectors and artisans.
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, Dr Roselyn Campbell, author of the study from Purdue University in the US, notes: "While Aha, the first ruler of the First Dynasty, seems to have only had a few subsidiary burials, his successors included hundreds of subsidiary graves around their tombs and enclosures."
The graves of the retainers were excavated in the 1920s by the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who believed them to be an example of human sacrifice – a view some later experts agreed with.
But there was a snag: Petrie did not find any evidence of trauma on the remains. While he suggested the individuals may have been buried alive, others suggested the retainers died naturally and were later reburied at Abydos when their ruler died.
Campbell re-examined the skulls of 46 retainers excavated from graves surrounding the funerary enclosures of three different royals – King Djer, King Djet, and Queen Merneith – from the Duckworth Collections at the University of Cambridge.
"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.
Campbell 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 believs Petrie may have seen the skull fractures but did not realise they were injuries that occurred around the time of death, rather than arising as a result of later damage.
The fractures, she adds, 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. Instead they are more likely to have been caused by flat, wide objects made of wood or antler.
"For the crania without trauma, we 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, we simply can't see the full extent of these funerary rituals, nor can we be sure that this sample is truly representative of all the retainers."
Campbell noted the number of subsidiary graves tapered off quickly and seems to have disappeared with the beginning of the Second Dynasty.
Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo, said while the idea of retainer sacrifice was not totally new, "this paper is one of the few times that rigorous current methodologies are being used to evaluate these remains".
She added: "The practice was short-lived, with people being replaced by statuettes. Possibly some or all retainers felt that this was a boon and that they would enjoy an eternal life in the service of the god-king, though they might also have resented it, been terrified, and tried to escape this fate."
Dr Dawn McCormack, an Egyptologist at Samford University, 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 only involved a small number of skulls from the burial site, "the idea that some of the people may have been violently killed, I think, is something that in reality we might expect", she said.
Egypt's First Kings May Have Been Buried With Human Sacrifices
Jess Cockerill
Sun, October 4, 2026
SCIENCE ALERT
Illustrative generic image of a skull in a laboratory.
(EvgeniyShkolenko/iStockphoto/Getty Images)
Key takeaways
Archaeologist Roselyn Campbell's modern forensic approach confirms potentially lethal injuries on 18 of the 46 skulls excavated by British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in ancient Egyptian First Dynasty graves.
You might have read somewhere that in ancient Egypt, royalty were often buried with people sacrificed to serve them in the afterlife, but archaeologists aren't actually so sure about that.
When British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated graves surrounding the tombs of ancient Egyptian First Dynasty kings in the 1920s, he found the remains of many more people – hundreds, in some cases.
At the time, he suspected the people in these satellite graves could have been sacrificed shortly after each king's death, in what is known as a retainer sacrifice.
But Petrie was unable to find evidence for how these people died, a gap that has left this theory open to doubt.
Archaeologist Roselyn Campbell, of Purdue University in the US, has been revisiting Petrie's work with a modern forensic approach, confirming that 18 of the 46 skulls Petrie preserved and brought back to England show signs of potentially lethal injuries.
She presents her findings in a new paper, published today in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
These skulls were unearthed from around the royal funerary complexes at Umm el-Qaab in ancient Abydos, where they were interred near ancient Egypt's first kings. These First Dynasty leaders ruled from around 3078 to 2900 BCE.
Some of the graves surrounding the royal burials were marked with names and official titles, identifying them as lower- or mid-level officials, or artisans.
"Each subsidiary burial was a simple chamber in a row of dozens of others," says Campbell.
"Some people had a simple coffin. Most people had a few grave goods, like ceramic vessels, and many graves also included small objects like copper tools, projectile points, or small ivory figurines."
Campbell has been re-analyzing the skulls of these ancient Egyptian civilians for several years.
Linear fractures across the skullcap are the most common injuries she has found – a kind of damage that is usually caused by flat, wide objects.
In a few of the skulls, Campbell also found sharp force injuries, including "a penetrative injury to the side of the head" and "a chopping injury to the eye".
"While it is certainly possible that some individuals may have died peacefully from some other cause and been buried around the royal funerary complexes, it is also clear that many of these individuals did experience perimortem trauma of some kind," Campbell writes.
In other words, it's quite likely that these subjects were killed deliberately, by traumatic blows to the head.
"Petrie believed that the closure of so many graves at once made individual interments after natural deaths unlikely, and the apparently hasty closure of so many tombs along with the identity of officials associated in some way with the royal court led him to conclude that these burials probably represented retainer sacrifice," Campbell writes.
Her findings lend further credence to Petrie's theory: that the people in these subsidiary burials may have been sacrificed when their king died, with the belief that they would serve their ruler in the afterlife.
If so, it also seems this practice started very early in the culture of ancient Egypt.
"Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honor, others may have been chosen or even forced," Campbell suggests.
"If I had unlimited resources, I would love to figure out where the bodies of these individuals might be and analyze them!
"Still, this study shows how much new information about the past can be revealed when we revisit previous data armed with updated methods and knowledge, even for datasets that are incomplete and imperfect like this one."
The research has been published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
Key takeaways
Archaeologist Roselyn Campbell's modern forensic approach confirms potentially lethal injuries on 18 of the 46 skulls excavated by British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in ancient Egyptian First Dynasty graves.
You might have read somewhere that in ancient Egypt, royalty were often buried with people sacrificed to serve them in the afterlife, but archaeologists aren't actually so sure about that.
When British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated graves surrounding the tombs of ancient Egyptian First Dynasty kings in the 1920s, he found the remains of many more people – hundreds, in some cases.
At the time, he suspected the people in these satellite graves could have been sacrificed shortly after each king's death, in what is known as a retainer sacrifice.
But Petrie was unable to find evidence for how these people died, a gap that has left this theory open to doubt.
Archaeologist Roselyn Campbell, of Purdue University in the US, has been revisiting Petrie's work with a modern forensic approach, confirming that 18 of the 46 skulls Petrie preserved and brought back to England show signs of potentially lethal injuries.
She presents her findings in a new paper, published today in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
These skulls were unearthed from around the royal funerary complexes at Umm el-Qaab in ancient Abydos, where they were interred near ancient Egypt's first kings. These First Dynasty leaders ruled from around 3078 to 2900 BCE.
Some of the graves surrounding the royal burials were marked with names and official titles, identifying them as lower- or mid-level officials, or artisans.
"Each subsidiary burial was a simple chamber in a row of dozens of others," says Campbell.
"Some people had a simple coffin. Most people had a few grave goods, like ceramic vessels, and many graves also included small objects like copper tools, projectile points, or small ivory figurines."
Campbell has been re-analyzing the skulls of these ancient Egyptian civilians for several years.
Linear fractures across the skullcap are the most common injuries she has found – a kind of damage that is usually caused by flat, wide objects.
In a few of the skulls, Campbell also found sharp force injuries, including "a penetrative injury to the side of the head" and "a chopping injury to the eye".
"While it is certainly possible that some individuals may have died peacefully from some other cause and been buried around the royal funerary complexes, it is also clear that many of these individuals did experience perimortem trauma of some kind," Campbell writes.
In other words, it's quite likely that these subjects were killed deliberately, by traumatic blows to the head.
"Petrie believed that the closure of so many graves at once made individual interments after natural deaths unlikely, and the apparently hasty closure of so many tombs along with the identity of officials associated in some way with the royal court led him to conclude that these burials probably represented retainer sacrifice," Campbell writes.
Her findings lend further credence to Petrie's theory: that the people in these subsidiary burials may have been sacrificed when their king died, with the belief that they would serve their ruler in the afterlife.
If so, it also seems this practice started very early in the culture of ancient Egypt.
"Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honor, others may have been chosen or even forced," Campbell suggests.
"If I had unlimited resources, I would love to figure out where the bodies of these individuals might be and analyze them!
"Still, this study shows how much new information about the past can be revealed when we revisit previous data armed with updated methods and knowledge, even for datasets that are incomplete and imperfect like this one."
The research has been published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
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