New Research

New Research Shows That These Ancient Egyptian Servants May Have Been Brutally Sacrificed and Buried Alongside Their Pharaohs

Forensic research has identified deliberate and fatal wounds on skulls from simple grave sites near First Dynasty royal tombs in Upper Egypt

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

October 6, 2026 11:09 a.m.

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Five thousand years ago, some of ancient Egypt’s first royals were laid to rest in grand tombs, accompanied by hundreds of their courtiers. Archaeologists have long puzzled over this arrangement. But a new forensic study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology suggests that these servants may have been prematurely dispatched to the afterlife, where they could serve their rulers for all eternity.

Study author Roselyn Campbell, a bioarchaeologist at Purdue University, analyzed 46 skulls from Umm el-Qaab, a royal cemetery in Abydos, where Egypt’s first pharaohs were interred.

The famed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie first excavated these skulls back in the 1920s, when he discovered hundreds of graves surrounding Abydos’ royal tombs. Reasoning that these retainers (court officials and servants) likely didn’t die of natural causes simultaneously, Petrie suspected they had been sacrificed. But he couldn’t find physical evidence of murder to back up his hunch.

Campbell has now reassessed some of the preserved skulls using modern forensic methods. She found that 18 of the 46 crania had suffered significant trauma, suggesting that these individuals were “deliberately killed by blows to the head,” per a statement from Frontiers.

“This question of whether or not retainer sacrifice was practiced in Egypt has been debated for over a century, but this is the first study to examine the human remains from the tombs themselves,” Campbell tells the Guardian’s Nicola Davis.

The retainers were interred in rows of simple “subsidiary burials” surrounding the funerary enclosures of three royals: King Djer (the third pharaoh of Egypt’s First Dynasty, who ruled around 3000 B.C.E.) and two of his successors, King Djet and Queen Meretneith.

“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 says in the statement. “Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honor. Others may have been chosen or even forced.”

The wounds that Campbell identified include multiple linear fractures across cranial vaults, a “penetrative injury” to the side of a head and a “chopping injury” to an eye, per the study. The individuals without skull injuries may have died naturally. Or maybe they were killed via methods such as asphyxiation, which wouldn’t have left skeletal marks for archaeologists to find.

Nobody knows what kinds of weapons the ancient Egyptians used to cause the skull injuries. “Based on comparative forensic and archaeological studies, the most likely implement would have been flat and relatively light, probably made out of something like wood rather than stone,” Campbell tells Live Science’s Owen Jarus.

According to the study, the first king of the First Dynasty, Aha, was buried with a few subsidiaries. Djer, Djet and Meretneith were then buried with hundreds, clearly taking retainer sacrifice to new heights. But by the beginning of Egypt’s Second Dynasty, around 2730 B.C.E., subsidiary graves had all but disappeared.

“The practice was short-lived, with people being replaced by statuettes,” Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Guardian. “Possibly some or all retainers felt that this was a boon and that they would enjoy an eternal life in the service of the god-king, though they might also have resented it, been terrified, and tried to escape this fate.”

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.