Almost four in 10 royal household members buried in an ancient Egyptian king’s tomb were probably killed by a deliberate blow to the head, according to a study of skulls excavated from the site a century ago.
English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who has been referred to as the “father of Egyptian archaeology”, excavated graves at Abydos in Egypt in the 1920s.
Due to the large number of burials clustered around the tombs he doubted that so many people could have died from natural causes simultaneously.
Petrie suspected that members of the royal household had been sacrificed following the deaths of kings, but could not prove it due to the lack of fatal wounds on the skeletons.
Cold case
Now a new study of the skulls from the site, using modern forensic methods, has shown that almost 39 per cent had died after being struck in the head.
Petrie kept meticulous records. He reburied most of the remains he excavated, but kept the skulls, some of which he sent to the UK.
Dr Roselyn Campbell, of Purdue University, found 46 of these in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University and re-examined them, identifying crucial new evidence of violence. She found 18 of the 46 skulls showed evidence of significant cranial trauma – linear fractures which Petrie seems to have mistaken for naturally-caused damage.
“Advances in forensic science allow us to recognise them as perimortem injuries,” said Dr Campbell.
“The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding and death,” said Dr Campbell, who also reported evidence of sharp-force trauma on some of the 18 skulls, including a chopping injury to one individual’s eye.
The burial complexes at Abydos were built around 3000BC by the first kings of a unified Egypt. In addition to the royal tombs themselves, they consisted of chamber tombs probably used for funerary rituals, and were surrounded by further subsidiary enclosures.
Dr Campbell, author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology and of a forthcoming book, State-sanctioned Violence and Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt, said Petrie suspected human sacrifice because of the sheer number of the subsidiary graves, some numbering in the hundreds.
“Each subsidiary burial was a simple chamber in a row of dozens of others,” said Dr 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 midlevel officials as well as artisans.”
Weapons
She said it was still impossible to say what exactly had happened. “Egyptian kings are often depicted smiting their enemies with a mace, but these weren’t their enemies, and a mace would have caused depressed fractures,” she said.
“Linear fractures are generally caused by a flat, wide weapon, or a fall – but falling hard enough to create a cranial fracture would probably have broken other bones, which should have been visible in Petrie’s photographs or recorded in his notes.
“We also don’t know what happened to the others. Some could have died naturally. Alternatively, they may have been killed in a way that isn’t visible skeletally – like asphyxiation – or in a way that we would be able to detect if we could examine the rest of their skeleton.”
Dr Campbell said she was drawn to the servants, officials and household staff – known as retainers – because, even though they were buried around royalty, “they were mostly footnotes in the grander narrative”.
She asked the question: “Who were these people and how did they view the ruler and their own role in his or her life and death?
She added: “Retainer sacrifice is a type of human sacrifice where those close to a ruler are killed when the ruler dies.
“In many cultures, retainer sacrifice is practised 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 honour, others may have been chosen or even forced.”
