Forensic Tests Show Ancient Egyptians Sacrificed Servants After Kings' Deaths

Researchers have done a forensic examination of human remains found around the funerary complexes of Ancient Egyptian kings and found that they belonged to servants who were apparently sacrificed when the monarchs died. It's a long-debated topic whether Egypt's earliest pharaohs had their royal servants killed and buried alongside them, and now this new study based on modern forensic tests has uncovered physical proof that the ancient skulls show signs of fatal head injuries received right around the time of burial.

The study, led by bioarchaeologist Dr Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University, reexamined 5,000-year-old human remains from Egypt's First Dynasty (around 3100-2900 BC).

The findings, published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, suggest that royal household members were deliberately sacrificed to serve their rulers in the afterlife.

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"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," Campbell, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University in Indiana, told CNN on Monday. She is the one who analysed the skulls from that original excavation.

"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," she added.

The research focuses on graves discovered at Abydos, an ancient royal burial ground in southern Egypt. When British archaeologist Flinders Petrie originally excavated the remains in the 1920s, several researchers were stunned by the "sheer number" of graves.

"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," Campbell said.

"Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honour; others may have been chosen or even forced."

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Back then, Petrie suspected that they were sacrificed, but he couldn't spot weapon marks or fatal wounds on the bones, so his theory remained unproven.

Petrie reburied most of the bodies but kept several dozen skulls, coating them in wax to keep them intact. Those skulls eventually ended up at the University of Cambridge, where they sat in storage until Campbell's team brought in modern forensic techniques.

"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.

Researchers reexamined 46 preserved skulls and discovered that 18 of them, nearly 39%, had distinct fractures that occurred at or around the time of death.

While the idea of servants being killed for their kings sounds brutal, researchers note that retainer sacrifice was a short-lived phase in ancient Egyptian history.