Skull Fractures Point To Human Sacrifice In Ancient Egypt

Century-Old Skulls Revive Debate Over Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt’s first kings may not have gone into the afterlife alone. Nearly 40 percent of a set of 5,000-year-old skulls from graves around their funerary monuments carry head fractures from around the time of death. The archaeologist who dug them up in the 1920s apparently saw the cracks, even coated them in wax, yet wrote them off as damage from the soil.

Roselyn A. Campbell of Purdue University revisits the skulls with modern forensic methods in a new paper in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. Her analysis adds weight to a long-running claim that officials and household members, known as retainers, were killed when a ruler died, a practice called retainer sacrifice.

Campbell does not claim every burial was a killing. Even so, the skulls offer physical evidence of head injuries that the original excavator misread.

Petrie Found No Wounds, Leaving Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt Unproven

Around 3000 BCE, the first kings of a unified Egypt were buried at Abydos in tombs with nearby enclosures likely used for funeral rituals. Rows of small graves surrounded both, sometimes hundreds of them. Grave markers list titles such as seal-bearer, inspector, and physician, mostly lower- or mid-level officials and artisans.

Archaeologist Flinders Petrie suspected sacrifice because many graves seemed to have been filled and sealed in a single event, which made natural deaths unlikely. But he found no wounds on the skeletons, and scholars have argued ever since. Some propose the people died naturally and were buried near the tomb over time. Campbell says she was drawn to the retainers partly because they are “mostly relegated to footnotes in the grander narrative.”

Head Fractures Showed Up in 18 of 46 Ancient Egyptian Skulls

Petrie reburied most of the remains he excavated but kept the skulls, some of which went to England. Campbell found 46 of them in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University, from graves around the funerary enclosures of three early rulers, Djer, Djet, and Merneith. Only skulls survive, representing just 5% to 15% of the people buried at each enclosure, so the sample may not reflect everyone.

Injuries from around the time of death appeared on 18 of the 46 skulls, or 39%. Most were linear fractures, straight cracks across the top of the skull. A few were sharper, including a puncture to the side of the head and a chopping injury to the eye. Forensic scientists can tell when a bone broke by how it looks. Fresh bone still holds moisture from life, so it bends before snapping and leaves sharp, angled edges, while dried-out bone breaks with rough, uneven surfaces.

Linear fractures “would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death,” Campbell said. Still, the timing of these injuries is fuzzy. Such an injury could have happened shortly before, at, or shortly after death, such as while a body was moved. Campbell writes there is “no way to prove that these injuries caused death.”

Wax Around Cracks on Ancient Egyptian Skulls Suggests Petrie Saw the Damage

Petrie coated fragile bones in paraffin wax, a common practice then, and often applied it directly around the fracture lines. That placement suggests he noticed the cracks and judged them weak, yet blamed the burial environment. Bioarchaeology, the field combining skeleton study with archaeological context, had not yet emerged as a specialty, and projects usually called in a medical doctor after digging ended.

Petrie also floated a grimmer idea, that some people were “stunned (perhaps with a sand-bag) and buried before coming to.” Campbell notes that lifelike poses, such as a raised knee, can reflect how a body settles while it decays. Tightly connected finger joints suggest the bodies were protected by coffins or slowly covered with soil. She calls the buried-alive scenario difficult to confirm.

Flat Weapon, Not a Mace, Likely Left the Ancient Egyptian Skull Fractures

Egyptian art shows kings smiting enemies with a mace, so a ritual mace blow is tempting. But those scenes depict enemies, not court officials, and a stone mace would cause depressed fractures, dents in the bone. Single linear fractures like these usually come from a flat, wide object made of wood, antler, or another light material. A fall is another possibility, but falling hard enough to crack a skull would probably break other bones, damage that should appear in Petrie’s photographs or notes.

Campbell cannot say what happened to the rest of the retainers. Some could have died naturally, and others may have been killed in ways that leave no mark on the skull, such as suffocation. Some may have volunteered, while “others may have been chosen or even forced.”

Abydos is not the only reassessed site. At the royal tombs of Ur in modern Iraq, CT scans of two skulls showed severe blunt force injuries hidden beneath headdresses, overturning a theory of peaceful poisoning.

Whether every retainer was killed may never be known, but a century-old skull collection has held evidence of these injuries all along, waiting for forensic science to catch up.

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