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# Skull injuries in 18 of 46 Abydos burials reopen the retainer-sacrifice debate
- URL: https://theegyptfiles.com/abydos-skulls-trauma-retainer-sacrifice-study/
- Published: 2026-10-18T07:53:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-18T07:53:41.000Z
- Description: A reassessment of 46 skulls from burials beside First Dynasty royal enclosures at Abydos reports potentially lethal trauma in 18, from a sample its author calls incomplete.
- Author: J E Cowie
- Tags: News

For a century, one of Egyptology's grimmest arguments has run on a very thin diet of evidence. Did the first kings of Egypt take their courtiers with them when they died? A paper published on 5 October 2026 says that when the skulls were finally re-examined with modern forensic methods, 18 of 46 showed signs of potentially lethal injury around the time of death. The paper notes that this trauma finding "has been published elsewhere"; its stated purpose is to set out the advances in bioarchaeology and forensics that made it possible. The author's own account of what that can and can't prove is more careful than most of the headlines.

![Map showing where Abydos is](https://theegyptfiles.com/content/images/2026/10/map_abydos.jpg)

Abydos, Sohag Governorate, Egypt

## What Petrie saw, and what he didn't

Around the First Dynasty royal tombs and funerary enclosures at Umm el-Qaab in Abydos, the paper says, were buried sometimes hundreds of individuals, presumed to be members of the dead ruler's court. The First Dynasty is dated in the paper to c.3078–2900 BCE.

![The Temple of Seti I at Abydos, Egypt](https://theegyptfiles.com/content/images/2026/10/shot2_the-temple-of-seti-i-at-abydos-egypt.jpg)

File photo of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos.

Flinders Petrie excavated the subsidiary burials around the enclosures in the early 1920s. According to the paper, he found no evidence of lethal trauma in the skeletons, yet believed they represented retainer sacrifice, in which members of the court are killed to accompany a dead ruler into the afterlife. His reasoning, as the paper describes it, was that so many graves closed at once, apparently in haste, made individual burials after natural deaths unlikely. Where grave stelae survived, the titles on them mostly reflected low- to mid-level officials such as seal-bearers, inspectors and artisans.

Others read the graves differently. The paper notes the proposal that these people died naturally and were deposited around the king's tomb over time. It also notes Reisner's statement that many of the graves were sealed individually rather than in large groups.

Here is the part that should bother anyone who likes their Egyptology settled. The paper says both sides of the argument "have proceeded without an updated, expert analysis of the human remains", and that "Egyptologists have largely been forced to depend on the initial analyses of the human remains in these burials, conducted over a century ago." Those are the paper's words about the state of the field, not mine.

## What the new study reports

Roselyn A. Campbell, of the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, analysed the 46 crania from the subsidiary graves around the enclosures of Djer, Djet and Merneith. They are held in the Duckworth Collection of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University. The paper's count excludes two individuals represented only by mandibles. We looked at the earlier work on these remains [here](https://theegyptfiles.com/the-bones-were-there-all-along-abydos-retainer-sacrifice-revisited/).

Her paper, in *Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology*, states: "Evidence for perimortem, potentially lethal cranial trauma was found in 18 (39%) of the 46 preserved crania." Linear fractures across the cranial vault were the most common injury. Several sharp-force injuries were also observed, including a penetrative injury to the side of the head and a chopping injury to the eye.

Campbell put it this way, as quoted by Archaeology Magazine: "The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death."

The paper also offers an explanation for why Petrie missed them. Petrie coated many of the skulls in paraffin wax, and the paper says it was applied specifically around many of the linear fractures. That, it suggests, means he did see the damage but lacked the expertise to tell injuries from around the time of death apart from damage done by the burial environment. The abstract puts it as the original excavators having "probably" observed the injuries and misinterpreted them as postmortem damage.

## How the paper reads the injuries

The paper tests the obvious guess, the royal mace of the smiting scenes, and rejects it. It says a mace would cause significant depressed fractures, and that single linear fractures like these are generally caused by flat, wide objects made of wood, antler or another material lighter than stone. Campbell told Live Science in an email that the most likely implement "would have been flat and relatively light, probably made out of something like wood rather than stone."

The paper also considers accidents. It says falls from a standing position may sometimes cause similar linear fractures, but that it would be "somewhat odd" for so many individuals to fall in the same way within this small sample. It adds that injuries above the "hat-brim" line tend, in forensic cases, to be caused by intentional blows rather than accidents such as falls. The linear fractures in these crania, it says, uniformly occur across the parietal bones.

## Where the caution belongs

The paper is open about its limits, and they matter.

- **A small slice of the dead.** The preserved crania represent between 5% and 15% of the total burial populations at each enclosure, which the paper says makes it difficult to assess whether the sample is truly representative.
- **Missing bodies.** The paper calls the remains "woefully incomplete", and says that without the rest of the skeletons, evidence of additional trauma is lost entirely. The postcranial remains were reburied together, so it considers it highly unlikely they could be matched to their skulls.
- **Wax.** The paper says Petrie's paraffin often obscures differences in colour between fractured and unfractured bone, so that criterion for spotting injuries from around the time of death can't be applied consistently.
- **Not every skull.** The paper allows that some individuals may have died peacefully and been buried around the royal complexes, though it says many experienced perimortem trauma of some kind.

The wording also shifts between sources. The paper says "potentially lethal". Live Science reported that, according to a statement from the journal, Campbell found trauma that was likely fatal, indicating these individuals were likely sacrificed. These are not the same claim, and the paper itself is the more hedged of the two.

Live Science quoted one outside Egyptologist. Jacobus van Dijk of Groningen University, who was not involved in the study, said the "existence of retainer sacrifice in early Egypt has always been controversial and Dr Campbell's research adds an important argument in support of scholars who, like myself, believe this custom was practised in Egypt in the early dynastic period." He also said he was surprised by the method, because depictions of ritual killing on wooden labels "seems to indicate that the victim was kneeling with his hands tied behind his back being stabbed in the chest with a knife."

## The verdict

My reading: this paper does not close the case, and it doesn't claim to. What it does is more damaging to complacency than a verdict would be. Skulls that sat in a Cambridge collection turn out to carry injuries that modern methods can recognise. On the paper's own account, both sides of the argument over royal sacrifice at Abydos long proceeded without an updated, expert analysis of the remains. The injuries make a sacrifice reading look more plausible than it did. Whether it is the right reading depends on the rest of the burial populations, whose skulls aren't in that collection, and on bodies the paper considers it highly unlikely anyone could now match to them.

## Sources

Archaeology Magazine (2026) 'Did Egypt's First Pharaohs Demand Human Sacrifice?', Archaeology Magazine, 6 October 2026, available at: [https://archaeology.org/news/2026/10/06/did-egypts-first-pharaohs-demand-human-sacrifice/](https://archaeology.org/news/2026/10/06/did-egypts-first-pharaohs-demand-human-sacrifice/?ref=theegyptfiles.com) (Accessed: 18 October 2026).

Campbell, R.A. (2026) 'New data from old bones: using bioarchaeology and forensics to reassess legacy data from ancient Abydos, Egypt', Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, 5, 5 October 2026, doi: 10.3389/fearc.2026.1858940, available at: [https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeology/articles/10.3389/fearc.2026.1858940/full](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-archaeology/articles/10.3389/fearc.2026.1858940/full?ref=theegyptfiles.com) (Accessed: 18 October 2026).

Jarus, O. (2026) 'Ancient Egyptians sacrificed pharaohs' servants so they could continue to serve their king in the afterlife, new study finds', Live Science, 5 October 2026, available at: [https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/ancient-egyptians-sacrificed-pharaohs-servants-so-they-could-continue-to-serve-their-king-in-the-afterlife-new-study-finds](https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/ancient-egyptians-sacrificed-pharaohs-servants-so-they-could-continue-to-serve-their-king-in-the-afterlife-new-study-finds?ref=theegyptfiles.com) (Accessed: 18 October 2026).

## Picture credits

- Top picture: A label from the tomb of King Djer. Label from Tomb of King Djer — photo: akhenatenator ([CC0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/?ref=theegyptfiles.com)), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Label%5Ffrom%5FTomb%5Fof%5FKing%5FDjer.jpg?ref=theegyptfiles.com)
- File photo of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos. Image: Temple of Seti I, Abydos, Egypt — Vyacheslav Argenberg ([CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/?ref=theegyptfiles.com)), via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Temple%5Fof%5FSeti%5FI,%5FAbydos,%5FEgypt.jpg?ref=theegyptfiles.com)
- Map: drawn from [Natural Earth](https://www.naturalearthdata.com/?ref=theegyptfiles.com) (public domain) and [Wikidata](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q192268?ref=theegyptfiles.com).