Serving Egypt’s earliest kings may have carried a deadly cost, and overlooked skull injuries are giving a century-old suspicion new weight.
Some of Egypt’s earliest royal tombs at Abydos are surrounded by hundreds of smaller graves. When Flinders Petrie excavated the site in the 1920s, he suspected that so many people could not have died naturally at the same time. He proposed that members of the royal household had been killed after their rulers died, yet he found no evidence of fatal wounds.
A new examination of 46 skulls from those graves has identified significant cranial trauma in 18 of them. The study, conducted by Dr. Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University and published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, suggests that at least 39% of the people represented in this sample may have been deliberately killed by blows to the head.
“Retainer sacrifice is a type of human sacrifice where those close to a ruler are killed when the ruler dies,” explained Campbell. “In many cultures, retainer sacrifice is practiced because of beliefs that the sacrificed individuals will continue to serve the ruler in some kind of afterlife, but retainer sacrifice can also be a visceral display of the ruler’s power. Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honor, others may have been chosen or even forced.”
Skull fractures point to lethal blows
Petrie kept meticulous excavation records but reburied most of the remains, retaining skulls and sending some to the United Kingdom. Campbell located 46 of those skulls in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University. Using modern forensic knowledge, she recognized linear fractures as perimortem injuries, meaning they occurred around the time of death. Petrie appears to have mistaken those fractures for damage from natural causes.
“The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death,” said Campbell. Some of the 18 injured skulls also showed evidence of sharp-force trauma, including a chopping injury to one individual’s eye.
Egyptian kings are often depicted striking their enemies with a mace, but these retainers were not enemies, and a mace would be expected to leave depressed fractures, with bone pushed inward. Linear fractures generally result from a broad, flat weapon or a fall, so the injuries do not establish exactly how these people died. A fall severe enough to fracture the skull would probably have broken other bones, however, and those injuries should have appeared in Petrie’s photographs or notes.
Officials and artisans beside royal tombs
“I was drawn to these retainers partly because, even though they were buried around royalty, they are mostly relegated to footnotes in the grander narrative,” said Campbell, whose forthcoming book is State-sanctioned Violence and Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt (Routledge Press). “Who were these people and how did they view the ruler and their own role in his or her life and death?”
The funerary complexes were built around 3000 BCE by the First Dynasty rulers, the first kings of a unified Egypt. Alongside the royal tombs were chamber tombs and enclosures probably used for funerary rituals. Smaller, subsidiary burials surrounded both the tombs and the enclosures.
“Each subsidiary burial was a simple chamber in a row of dozens of others,” said 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. Petrie found a few grave markers that had names and sometimes official titles on them. The titles seem to mostly refer to lower- or mid-level officials as well as artisans.”
Some of the other retainers may have died naturally. Others could have been killed by means that leave no skeletal trace, such as asphyxiation, or suffered injuries that could only be detected by examining the rest of their skeletons.
“If I had unlimited resources, I would love to figure out where the bodies of these individuals might be and analyze them!” said Campbell. “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.”
Reference: “New data from old bones: using bioarchaeology and forensics to reassess legacy data from ancient Abydos, Egypt” by Roselyn A. Campbell, 04 October 2026, Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
DOI: 10.3389/fearc.2026.1858940
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