Who Was Buried Beside Egypt’s Kings?

A new examination of human remains from Umm el-Qa’ab near Abydos, Egypt, has found skull injuries that suggest some royal attendants may have been sacrificed. Dr. Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University examined 46 skulls from subsidiary graves around the funerary enclosures of King Djer, King Djet, and Queen Merneith. Eighteen showed potentially lethal trauma, the Guardian reports. The cemetery belongs to Egypt’s First Dynasty and dates as far back as about 3000 BC.

Campbell’s study, published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, interprets the fractures as injuries sustained around the time of death rather than damage incurred later. One skull also bore a chopping injury to the eye. Campbell considers flat, wide objects made of wood or antler more likely causes of the fractures than the mace familiar from images of kings striking enemies. That distinction moves the inquiry from royal imagery toward the material evidence of particular deaths.

The question is older than this examination. Flinders Petrie excavated the retainers’ graves in the 1920s and proposed human sacrifice, but he reported no trauma supporting that explanation. Petrie suggested burial alive; other scholars proposed natural deaths followed by reburial when the ruler died. Campbell re-examined skulls now held in the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Collections. Her findings strengthen the argument for violence near death, although an injury alone cannot establish the occasion, perpetrator, or ritual purpose.

The sample also sets a boundary. These 46 skulls cannot supply a verdict for every subsidiary burial, and the absence of skull trauma cannot establish either sacrifice or natural death. Campbell notes that Aha, the first ruler of the dynasty, had only a few subsidiary burials, while successors had hundreds around their tombs and enclosures. The larger pattern gives the sacrifice interpretation context. It does not make every surrounding grave the same kind of evidence.

Those graves are thought to include members of royal households: ladies, seal-bearers, inspectors, and artisans. A history organized around sovereigns can treat such people as a measure of royal reach, much as it counts the size of an enclosure. Yet a seal-bearer handled the business of authority, and an artisan made things other people used. Royal service may have included obligations no employment notice recorded. The irony belongs to power, not to the people whose remains now bear examination.

A burial beside a ruler preserves a relationship, but the placement does not explain whether the attendant chose it or how the attendant died. Further examination could test the timing and causes of injuries, compare other remains, and assess what surviving bones reveal about health and working life. Better dating, where feasible, could also help distinguish coordinated deaths from later reburial. The royal names remain useful coordinates. The work ahead is to recover as much as possible about the people buried around them without giving uncertain evidence a certainty those people cannot contest.