By Jack Guy
(CNN) — Forensic examination of human remains found around the funerary complexes of Ancient Egyptian kings has uncovered evidence that they belonged to servants who were sacrificed when the monarchs died, according to a new study.
The remains of these servants, or retainers, were first excavated from the funerary complexes at Abydos, eastern Egypt, which date from around 3000 BC, in the 1920s.
Archaeologists at the time suspected that the individuals had been sacrificed, but no evidence of their cause of death was found, study author Roselyn A. Campbell, a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University in Indiana who examined the skulls from that original excavation, told CNN on Monday.
“By consulting modern forensic studies and advances in our understanding of how human bodies react to injuries and to decay processes over time, I was able to identify clear evidence of head injuries in some of these individuals that occurred around the time of death,” she said.
“These injuries, combined with the archaeological context, strongly suggest that at least some of the retainers were killed and then buried around the tombs of these rulers,” Campbell added.
It was the “sheer number” of graves that led Flinders Petrie, the British archaeologist who originally excavated the remains in the early 20th century, to suspect that the burials were a result of human sacrifice, according to a news release.
“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,” Campbell said in the release.
“Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honor, others may have been chosen or even forced.”
Petrie took photographs of the remains and kept records. He then reburied most of them, apart from the skulls, 46 of which Campbell found at Cambridge University.
“The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death,” Campbell said in the release, adding that linear fractures are generally caused by a flat, wide weapon.
Of the 46 preserved crania examined as part of the study, potentially lethal trauma was found in 18 of them, equivalent to 39%.
Campbell cautioned that this doesn’t mean that the hundreds of other burials in these areas were also victims of human sacrifice.
“With such a small and incomplete data set, and so many millennia having passed since these people were buried, we simply can’t be entirely certain if all these individuals were sacrificed, or only some of them, or if there is some other explanation that has been lost over time,” she said.
Some of them may have died naturally, or others may have been killed by asphyxiation or another method that isn’t visible, she added.
Katherine Slinger, a lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Manchester, England, who was not involved in the study, told CNN that while it had long been assumed that the royal retainers were sacrificed when a king died, little detail was known about the practice.
“The manner in which these retainers were killed has previously remained unclear, with theories ranging from strangulation to poisoning,” Slinger said.
“This is the first time that forensic evidence has supported this theory of human sacrifice and proved the manner in which at least some of these individuals were killed.”
Understanding sacrifice
Campbell is now preparing a book manuscript on the topic, slated for publication in 2027, which will look deeper “into who these retainers were, the context of Egyptian thought and society at this time, and more broadly how we study and understand violence and sacrifice in the past,” she said.
Karl Harrison, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Exeter, England, who was not involved in the study, told CNN that the findings are “genuinely really interesting.”
However, he warned against over-interpreting the intentions of the ancient Egyptians.
“While forensic science can help to understand patterns of injury, care must be taken in assessing what this means in terms of intentionality,” Harrison said via email.
“Ephemeral behaviours of past human cultures — especially those without written records or recorded in the writings of other peoples — offer a social complexity that defies our ability to comprehensively reconstruct,” he added.
The study was published in the journal Frontiers on Monday.
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