What We Know About Egypt's Royal 'Retainer Sacrifice' Skull Study

Fractures found in dozens of skulls excavated from Egypt's earliest royal cemetery suggest that court officials and craftspeople may have been killed when their rulers died, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, as reported by The Guardian.

Where were the remains found?

The skeletons come from Umm el-Qa'ab, a royal cemetery near Abydos that holds the tombs and funerary enclosures of First Dynasty rulers dating to roughly 3,000 BC. The site includes not only royal burials but also hundreds of surrounding graves belonging to people identified as members of royal households — ladies, seal-bearers, inspectors and artisans, according to the study.

Who conducted the research and how large was the sample?

Dr. Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University re-examined the skulls of 46 retainers pulled from graves surrounding the funerary enclosures of three different rulers: King Djer, King Djet, and Queen Merneith. The remains, excavated in the 1920s, are now held in the Duckworth Collections at the University of Cambridge, the Guardian reported.

What did Flinders Petrie originally claim?

The English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie first excavated the subsidiary graves at Umm el-Qa'ab and concluded they represented human sacrifice, a view some later experts shared. But Petrie did not find trauma on the remains he examined, a gap that left the theory contested for decades. Some researchers proposed instead that retainers died naturally and were reburied near their ruler's tomb after death, rather than killed to accompany the ruler into the afterlife.

Did the burial pattern change over time?

Campbell's study notes that the scale of these subsidiary burials shifted across the First Dynasty's early rulers. "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," Campbell wrote, according to the Guardian.

What does the new skull evidence show?

Campbell's re-examination found fractures in several of the 46 skulls, evidence Petrie's original survey did not record. The finding lends support to Petrie's original interpretation that at least some retainers at Umm el-Qa'ab were killed rather than buried after natural deaths, though the Guardian's report does not specify how many of the 46 skulls showed fractures or the precise nature of the injuries. The debate over whether retainer sacrifice was practiced in early Egypt has run for close to a century, the outlet noted.

What to watch next

• Whether Campbell's full paper in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology details fracture locations and likely causes of death for each individual.
• Whether other First Dynasty cemeteries beyond Umm el-Qa'ab yield comparable skeletal evidence.
• Whether scholars who favor the natural-death and reburial theory respond to the fracture findings in subsequent literature.
• Whether later Egyptian dynasties show a decline in subsidiary burials, which some Egyptologists have linked to an eventual end of the practice.

The full study is published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, as cited by the Guardian's science desk.

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