Science7 publishers3 min readPublished
Fractures on 18 of 46 Abydos skulls point to retainer sacrifice at the tombs of Egypt's first kings
Roselyn Campbell of Purdue found likely fatal fractures on 18 of 46 First Dynasty skulls from Abydos that Petrie had taken for natural damage. The result gives Petrie's 1920s suspicion of retainer sacrifice physical support, though only for the skulls he kept from hundreds of graves.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- Flinders Petrie, digging at Abydos in the 1920s, suspected retainer sacrifice because so many people seemed to have died at once, but he found no fatal wounds on the bones.
- Some of the 18 injured skulls also show sharp-force trauma, including a chopping wound to one person's eye.
- Grave markers name a few of the dead, and their titles point mostly to lower- or mid-level officials and artisans.
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Why it matters
- constraint The 39 percent applies only to the skulls that survived, so a count of how many retainers were killed across Abydos depends on finding the bodies Petrie reburied.
- capability Arguments about First Dynasty retainer sacrifice can now point to injuries on bone, where before they rested on how many graves surrounded a royal tomb.
- precedent The new evidence came from skulls stored for almost a century, so other old excavation collections can be checked the same way against the excavator's original reading.
The published summary says "at least 39%" of these individuals may have been killed by blows to the head [10]. That is 18 skulls out of 46 [1], and the 46 are simply the skulls that happened to survive. Petrie reburied most of the bodies he excavated at Abydos and kept the skulls, some of which went to the UK [4]. They then sat at Cambridge for almost 100 years [19]. The reporting does not say how he decided which skulls to keep. Some royal burials at the site are surrounded by hundreds of subsidiary graves [5]. The 39% describes one collection, and it cannot be stretched to cover the cemetery.
I like the design because it needed no new digging. Campbell, writing in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology [16], went back to bones Petrie had already handled and read them against current forensic standards. Petrie seems to have seen the linear fractures and taken them for natural damage. Modern forensic science identifies them as perimortem, meaning inflicted around the time of death [2]. "The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding and death," Campbell said [7].
A broken skull by itself shows violence close to death. The case for sacrifice comes from setting that beside what Petrie already knew. Each subsidiary grave was a simple chamber in a row of dozens, and many of the burials seem to have happened at the same time [6]. PopSci reports that between roughly 3100 and 2900 BCE, at least five First Dynasty rulers were buried with slain subordinates [15]. The bones cannot say whether anyone went willingly. "Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honor; others may have been chosen or even forced," Campbell said [17].
The thing this doesn't tell you is how the other 28 died [2]. According to PopSci, they could have died naturally, or been killed in ways that leave no trace on bone [13]. If any of them were killed without a skull injury, the share killed in this sample is above 39%, and the skulls alone cannot show it. The weapon is also unknown. Linear fractures are often caused by a wide, flat weapon, but Campbell stopped short of naming a method of execution [11]. Egyptian kings are often shown smiting enemies with a mace, and a mace does not cause the same injuries [12].
Most of the evidence that could answer these questions is still in the ground at Abydos, where Petrie reburied it [4]. "If I had unlimited resources, I would love to figure out where the bodies of these individuals might be and analyze them," Campbell said [14].
What to watch
- Whether the bodies Petrie reburied at Abydos can be found and examined, to test whether the trauma rate holds beyond the Cambridge skulls.
- Whether Campbell's forthcoming book, State-sanctioned Violence and Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt, ties individual injured skulls to specific royal complexes and burial rows.
- Whether other forensic anthropologists who re-examine the Duckworth crania agree that the linear fractures are perimortem.