Egypt’s early kings were buried with servants; skulls revive sacrifice theory

Image: Mike P Shepherd/Alamy Skull fractures found on remains from the royal cemetery at Umm el-Qa’ab near Abydos suggest that servants of Egypt’s earliest kings may have been sacrificed when their rulers died. A new study by bioarchaeologist Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University, published on 5 October 2026 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology and reported by Nicola Davis in The Guardian, re-examined skulls first excavated a century ago. Eighteen of forty-six skulls showed injuries consistent with death around the time of burial. The findings appear to support a theory proposed by the pioneering Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, though the evidence remains incomplete.How forensic bioarchaeology reexamined skulls from the First Dynasty royal cemetery at Abydos, EgyptAccording to the study ‘New data from old bones: using bioarchaeology and forensics to reassess legacy data from ancient Abydos, Egypt’ in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, the royal cemetery at Umm el-Qa’ab holds the tombs and funerary enclosures of the First Dynasty kings, who ruled roughly five thousand years ago. Around those structures lie hundreds of smaller graves, which scholars believe belong...