Forensics Confirm Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt

A century ago, one of Egyptology’s pioneering excavators looked at hundreds of graves clustered around Egypt’s earliest royal tombs and suspected something dark. He just couldn’t prove it. Modern forensic science finally can.

A Suspicious Number of Simultaneous Deaths

More than 500 years before the Great Pyramid was built, Egypt’s First Dynasty kings were buried at Umm el-Qa’ab, part of the ancient site of Abydos, surrounded by hundreds of subsidiary graves belonging to household officials and artisans. English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated these burials in the 1920s and noticed something odd: many of the deaths appeared to have happened at the same time, a suspiciously high number of simultaneous burials clustered around a single royal tomb. Petrie suspected retainer sacrifice, where people close to a ruler are killed when that ruler dies, but he found no wounds on the remains to support his theory, leaving the question unresolved for decades.

Mostly Footnotes in a Bigger Story

Dr. Roselyn Campbell, a researcher at Purdue University and author of a new study in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, set out to solve this cold case using modern forensic knowledge. “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,” Campbell said. “Who were these people and how did they view the ruler and their own role in his or her life and death?” Petrie kept meticulous records of the site, noting that each subsidiary burial was a simple chamber in a row of dozens of others. Most people had just a few grave goods, like ceramic vessels, copper tools, projectile points, or small ivory figurines, and some graves included markers bearing names and titles, mostly belonging to lower- or mid-level officials and artisans.

Eighteen of Forty-Six

Although Petrie reburied most of the skeletons he excavated, he preserved some skulls and sent a number of them to the United Kingdom. Campbell tracked down 46 of these skulls in the Duckworth Collection at the University of Cambridge, representing retainers buried around the funerary enclosures of three different early rulers: King Djer, King Djet, and Queen Meretneith. Re-examining them with current forensic methods, Campbell identified significant cranial trauma on 18 of the 46 skulls, roughly 39 percent. Most showed linear fractures that Petrie appears to have mistaken for naturally occurring damage, a pattern advances in forensic science now let researchers correctly recognize as injuries sustained right around the time of death.

Not a Mace, Something Else

“The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death,” Campbell said. She also identified sharp-force trauma on some of the 18 skulls, including a chopping injury to one individual’s eye. Egyptian art frequently depicts kings smiting their enemies with a mace, but Campbell notes these retainers weren’t enemies, and a mace would typically produce depressed fractures, dents punched into the bone, rather than the linear fractures she actually found. Linear fractures are usually caused by a flat, wide object, or by a fall, but a fall hard enough to fracture the skull would likely have broken other bones too, damage that should have shown up in Petrie’s own photographs or notes. Campbell suggests the fractures are more likely to have come from flat, wide objects made of wood or antler, rather than any weapon typically associated with Egyptian royal imagery.

What About the Other Skulls?

Campbell is careful not to overstate what the evidence shows. “For the crania without trauma, we cannot be certain they were sacrificed,” she said. “It’s quite possible that some of the retainers were sacrificed, while others were not. With such a small sample size of the original burial population, we simply can’t see the full extent of these funerary rituals, nor can we be sure that this sample is truly representative of all the retainers.” Some individuals could have died of natural causes and been buried near the royal complex regardless. Others may have been killed in ways that leave no visible trace on a skull alone, such as asphyxiation, evidence that would only show up if researchers could examine 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,” Campbell said. Notably, the number of subsidiary graves tapered off quickly after this period and disappeared entirely with the start of Egypt’s Second Dynasty.

What This Meant to the People Involved

Salima Ikram, a professor at the American University in Cairo who wasn’t involved in the study, said the idea of retainer sacrifice in early Egypt wasn’t entirely new, but called this research one of the few times rigorous current methodologies have actually been applied to evaluate these remains. She noted the practice was short-lived, with retainers eventually replaced by statuettes in later burial customs, and suggested that some or all retainers may have viewed their deaths as a boon, a path to eternal life in service of a god-king, though others might equally have resented it, felt genuine terror, or tried to escape that fate. Dr. Dawn McCormack, an Egyptologist at Samford University in Alabama, pointed out that similar sacrificial practices occurred across many different cultures and time periods, and that not everyone involved would necessarily have been compliant. “If you really think about what those scenes would have looked like, it would have been very gruesome,” she said, while cautioning that the study examined only a small sample of skulls from the site. Still, she added, “the idea that some of the people may have been violently killed, I think, is something that in reality we might expect.”

Sources

This report draws on the peer-reviewed study by Dr. Roselyn Campbell, published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology (2026), with additional reporting from The Guardian.