Earth
5,000-year-old skulls reveal royal sacrifices in Egypt
Popular Science reports that a forensic reexamination of ancient skulls from Abydos found trauma on 18 individuals, indicating they were killed to serve dead pharaohs.
Popular Science reports that a new study has closed a cold case nearly a century old. Researchers reexamined 46 skulls excavated in the 1920s from the First Dynasty burial site at Abydos, Egypt, and found clear signs of lethal trauma on 18 of them. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, says these were royal attendants killed to serve their pharaohs in the afterlife.
Between roughly 3100 and 2900 BCE, at least five First Dynasty rulers were buried with human sacrifices. Archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who led the Abydos excavations, suspected as much when he found hundreds of secondary graves near the royal tombs. But the skulls he sent to Cambridge University showed no obvious injuries, so the idea remained unconfirmed.
Roselyn Campbell, an archaeologist at Purdue University, applied modern forensic techniques to those stored crania. She found that 18 of 46 individuals bore linear fractures and other trauma that Petrie had mistaken for natural damage. "The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death," Campbell said in a statement.
Some skulls also show sharp-force trauma, and one has a chopping wound near the eye. Linear fractures like these are often caused by a wide, flat weapon, but the researchers stop short of naming the exact method. Ancient paintings show Egyptian kings smiting enemies with a mace, but a mace would leave different marks.
It's still unclear how the other 28 attendants died. They could have gone naturally, or the sacrifice may have left no evidence on bone. Petrie reburied most of the bodies he originally dug up, so many of these cases will stay open.
Campbell hopes to find those remains someday. "If I had unlimited resources, I would love to figure out where the bodies of these individuals might be and analyze them," she said.
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