Ancient Egyptian First Dynasty Retainer Sacrifice Reassessed by Roselyn Campbell

Accounts of ancient Egypt sometimes claim that members of the royal household were buried alongside people sacrificed to serve them in the next life. Archaeologists, however, have not been certain that this was truly the case.

When the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated graves surrounding the tombs of First Dynasty kings during the 1920s, he uncovered the remains of many additional people – in some instances, hundreds. Petrie proposed that those buried in these satellite graves may have been killed soon after each king died, in a practice termed retainer sacrifice.

He could not, however, establish how these individuals had died. That absence of evidence has meant the theory remained uncertain.

First Dynasty graves at Umm el-Qaab

Roselyn Campbell, an archaeologist at Purdue University in the US, has returned to Petrie's material using modern forensic methods. Her work confirms that 18 of the 46 skulls Petrie retained and brought to England carry injuries that may have been fatal.

Campbell sets out the results in a paper published today in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

The skulls came from the areas around the royal funerary complexes at Umm el-Qaab, in ancient Abydos, where they had been buried near Egypt's earliest kings. These First Dynasty rulers reigned from roughly 3078 to 2900 BCE.

Several graves encircling the royal burials bore names and official titles, indicating that the dead included lower- and middle-ranking officials as well as craftspeople.

"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."

Head injuries in the ancient Egyptian burials

For several years, Campbell has been examining the skulls of these ancient Egyptian non-royal individuals again. The injury she has encountered most frequently is a linear fracture running across the skullcap, damage generally inflicted by broad, flat objects.

A small number of skulls also showed injuries caused by sharp force, 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.

Put simply, the evidence makes it quite plausible that these people were intentionally killed by forceful impacts to the head.

Evidence for retainer sacrifice

"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 add support to Petrie's proposal that those in the subsidiary graves were perhaps sacrificed at the death of their king, in the expectation that they would continue serving their ruler after death. If that interpretation is correct, the custom began at a very early stage in ancient Egyptian culture.

"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 was published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

This article was fact-checked and edited by Rebecca Dyer. Although we take pride in our process, we are only human. If you notice an error, please tell us.