Killed for the King? A Century-Old Debate Over Egypt’s First Human Sacrifices Gets New Evidence

Archaeology has been around for a few centuries, and early archaeologists, however well (or ill) intentioned, often didn’t know what they were doing. They knew something lay beneath their feet, so they dug, recording some things, discarding others and taking only the occasional photograph. Their findings were published, and later generations cited them.

That isn’t inherently wrong. The problem comes when early claims rest on speculation or outdated methods and are rarely rechecked. The material gathers dust in storage while the claims are repeated.

That’s what happened at Abydos, ancient Egypt’s early royal cemetery. In the early 1900s, hundreds of people were found buried in rows around the royal tombs and interpreted as sacrifices, despite no visible injuries. That sparked a century-long debate over whether Egypt practised “retainer sacrifice,” and has shaped views of ancient Egypt’s First Dynasty, while the skeletons themselves went largely unexamined.

To find out whether these people were human sacrifices for Egypt’s first rulers, bioarchaeologist Roselyn Campbell returned to the surviving skulls shipped to England a century ago. Her findings suggest the story is far more complicated and remind us that how we read these individuals’ remains shapes our understanding of one of the best-known ancient civilisations, and that to really get that history right we sometimes have to go back through the dusty archive, not the next big sensational dig.

The Remains of A Dynasty

Ancient Egypt and Nubia have left behind countless remains, including human ones. But for a long time researchers studied human remains separately from the objects and graves they were found with (imagine going to a crime scene and looking only at the body, ignoring the weapon or the scene of the crime; you’d lose a lot of context).

This was the case for many graves surrounding the burial complex of Egypt’s First Dynasty kings (ca. 3078–2900 BCE) at a cemetery now called Umm el-Qaab. Many are now incomplete, scattered, and sometimes altered by early archaeologists who tried to preserve them, destroying useful information.

Many early archaeologists glued bones back together, but glue covers up cracks, cut marks, wounds, and signs of healing. Yet removing glue can be just as, if not more, destructive, leaving you with only half the information.

The bones analysed by Campbell underwent similar treatment. Uncovered by archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the 1920s, they came from the graves surrounding the royal funerary enclosures. Early scholars interpreted them as human sacrifices. Supposedly, early kings built lavish tombs and nearby enclosures where servants, retainers, and even the king’s ‘harems’ were ritually killed and buried.

The first king, Aha, only had a few such burials, while his successors had more and more, until the practice largely faded by the start of the Second Dynasty.

These burials had few grave goods, and some had names or titles. Petrie found no evidence of injury, though he believed they were sacrifices based on the sheer number and apparent hasty closure of the tombs. This lead many scholars to suggest these were the only secure evidence of Egyptian human sacrifice.

Reading Bones in the Early 20th Century

At the time, bioarchaeology didn’t exist. So, to interpret the finds, Petrie and other archaeologists relied on ‘cruder’ methods.

Among them was identifying males and females not on skeletal remains but on supposedly ‘male’ or ‘female’ grave goods and the occasional inscribed name. Petrie believed many of the interred were women, likely minor wives or concubines of the king, reflecting a widespread orientalist mindset of the early 20th century.

Some bodies were found in odd positions, which he believed meant the individuals were still alive when buried.

To assess these bodies, medical doctors were sometimes brought in. Now, I have a lot of respect for doctors, but doctors specialise in the living, perhaps the recently deceased. On top of that, doctors back then were limited by the methods and skills of their time.

So you can imagine that, when handed the dusty bones of an ancient Egyptian, the insights they could offer were probably limited. The reverse is just as true, of course. Hand me the skeleton of someone who was stabbed, and I can identify the cut marks and tell you whether the bone broke while it was still fresh, whether the individual was male or female, a teen or an adult, and much more. Ask me to treat a living stab victim, though, and, well, they won’t be with us for long.

To his credit, Petrie made meticulous notes. But Petrie also coated about 80 skulls in paraffin to ‘preserve’ them and sent 60 to the Eugenics Department at University College. According to Morant, writing in 1925, 81 skulls were waxed for transport but through some misadventure only 48 were packed and reached England. As for the remainder of the bones, Petrie reburied them.

Where? Somewhere inside a later royal enclosure built by King Khasekhemwy, all mixed together.

Evolution of Archaeology

The remains were not pristine to begin with; like many graves, they had been disturbed and looted long ago, and even more material was damaged or lost when shipped to England. Campbell estimates the surviving skulls represent only 5 to 15% of the people originally buried there.

They may not be representative either. Imagine a bag of Smarties: you have 100, 60 are yellow, 20 are blue, 10 are green, 5 red and 5 pink. You choose to give 30 to your friend, and by chance, 20 are blue, 2 are yellow, and 8 are green. Your friend would have a skewed perception of the original colour assemblage, and something similar may have occurred with the Abydos skulls. How many were male or female, how many were healthy or sickly, and how many were actually injured, fatally or otherwise?

Even if the original skeletons are found, likely all jumbled up, you probably couldn’t match the skull to the skeleton, and the layers of paraffin wax obscure signs of disease, breakage, and even indicators of sex. Sand and soil are trapped under the wax, and one skull even has a moth. Making what they can tell us far more limited than if they had bene found and excavated today.

Still, the remains have something to say about who these people were. Surviving grave markers suggest mostly low- or mid-ranking seal-bearers, inspectors and craftsmen, the skulls point mainly to young adults, and childhood stress markers indicate the statuses represented were more complex than Petrie had envisioned.

Petrie had reported no injuries, but that was likely because methods to identify them in archaeological bones were less developed. Petrie probably saw cracks on some of the skulls but took them for burial damage. This is probably why he waxed those breaks, making it harder to tell if they happened before death or after burial. Breaks in fresh bone (around the time of death) have sharp edges, are uniform in colour and show no signs of healing, while breaks in dry bone, long after death, are more uneven and can have different colours at the break than the rest of the bone.

Forensics have also helped archaeologists determine the type of injury. About 39% of the skulls had potentially lethal injuries, most from being whacked across the top and sides of the head with something. Specifically, something broad and flat, though a few show blade wounds.

This differs from the images of kings smiting their enemies with stone maces. These were not enemies, and the injuries were different. It is plausible they happened during a particularly nasty fall, but unlikely, as it would be quite the coincidence if 39% of the individuals just so happened to all have terrible falls, possibly leading to their deaths in rapid succession.

Studies of modern patients, including one of about 500 people, link fractures in this area to bleeding inside the skull. Without surgery, these injuries would likely have been fatal.

Meanwhile, modern studies from body farms and buried pig carcasses show that decay, weather, soil and scavengers can alter a body and hide or confuse evidence of injury. This matters because Petrie suggested some were buried alive, based on outstretched arms, a raised knee, etc. But bodies bloat and shift as they decay, causing some to look as if they had moved, while some of the positions described by Petrie would not have been possible unless limbs were propped up against things like coffins or walls.

Bodies chucked in hastily could explain the odd positions. As later generations of archaeologists have noted, excavators unfamiliar with anatomy tend to read lifelike positions as signs of live burial. Petrie may simply not have understood what he was looking at.

So was Petrie right? Were these individuals the victims of human sacrifice? Campbell’s re-examination suggests that at least some of Abydos’s retainers did not die peacefully. The evidence makes a good case for these having been human sacrifices, though probably not through live burial and perhaps through a blow to the head. However, given the lack of other skeletal remains, the waxy layer covering many of the skulls and the small sample size, we can’t say how many were killed, how, or whether any went willingly.

What is clear is that a century-long debate now has more evidence supporting one side than it did before, and it’s based on modern archaeological observation, not the educated guesses (or fanciful musings) of early researchers.

Even if we find the other remains, a conclusion may never appear. Archaeology is also inherently destructive, removing things from their original context, and archaeology of the early 20th century, in my opinion, was a little more destructive than in later decades. But Campbell’s study shows that reanalysing older remains, even if it doesn’t bring the prestige of finding the next big tomb or the grave of a famous pharaoh, does update what we know about ancient Egypt, much of which we base our current finds on. If we don’t update it, we work on outdated information that may be wrong.

If we are going to dig up the past, we should at least make sure we get its interpretation right, and that sometimes means slogging through old drawers, because the finds there are just as valuable as the finds to be made tomorrow.

Do you think these were sacrifices, and if so, do you think most went willingly or were they forced?

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References

Campbell, R. A. (2019). Kill thy neighbor: Violence, power, and human sacrifice in Ancient Egypt. University of California, Los Angeles.

Campbell RA (2026) New data from old bones: using bioarchaeology and forensics to reassess legacy data from ancient Abydos, Egypt. Front. Environ. Archaeol. 5:1858940. doi: 10.3389/fearc.2026.1858940