A forensic reexamination of 5,000-year-old skulls from one of ancient Egypt's earliest royal burial grounds has turned up evidence that some of the people buried alongside the country's first kings died violently — lending new support to a century-old theory that early Egyptian rulers were accompanied into the afterlife by sacrificed servants.
The study, published this fall in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, is the work of Roselyn Campbell, a bioarchaeologist at Purdue University. Campbell examined 46 skulls from the royal necropolis at Abydos, excavated more than a century ago by Flinders Petrie and now held in Cambridge University's Duckworth Collection. She found significant cranial trauma in 18 of them — about 39 percent — including several cases of sharp-force injury, among them a chopping wound near one individual's eye.
The tombs at Abydos were built around 3000 B.C. for the first kings of a unified Egypt and are surrounded by smaller "subsidiary" graves holding what archaeologists have long assumed were royal attendants, buried at the same time as their rulers. Petrie himself suspected some of the Abydos dead had been killed to serve the king in death, but lacked the forensic tools to confirm it. Campbell's reanalysis suggests he may have come close to the evidence without recognizing it: wax he applied to stabilize several skulls was concentrated directly over the fracture sites, which she argues he likely mistook for ordinary burial damage.
What the fractures can — and can't — prove
"Advances in forensic science allow us to recognize them as perimortem injuries," Campbell said of the trauma, which was identified using modern techniques unavailable to Petrie's generation. Most of the fractures are linear rather than the depressed fractures typically caused by a mace — the weapon most often depicted in royal Egyptian imagery — suggesting a flatter, wider implement, or conceivably a fall. Campbell notes that a fall severe enough to fracture a skull would usually also break other bones, which aren't recorded in Petrie's surviving photographs and notes.
Still, Campbell is careful not to overstate the finding. The exact cause of death for each individual remains unconfirmed, she said, and some of the 46 may have died of natural causes; others could have died in ways that leave no mark on the skull, such as asphyxiation, or in ways only detectable by examining bones below the neck — remains that were not part of this study. The sample itself is also partial: only a fraction of those originally buried in the subsidiary graves survive in any collection today.
The findings feed into Campbell's forthcoming book on state-sanctioned violence in early dynastic Egypt, and add forensic weight to a broader argument among Egyptologists that the consolidation of royal power in Egypt's first dynasty rested in part on the ruler's control over life and death — not just of enemies, but of the court serving him.
