A century after Flinders Petrie suspected that the neat rows of subsidiary graves at Abydos were not a coincidence of nature, a new forensic study has pushed that suspicion much closer to proof. Re-examining 46 skulls from First Dynasty burials, Dr Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University found significant cranial trauma on 18 of them, evidence consistent with deliberate killing around the time of death.
The graves sit beside the tombs and funerary enclosures of Egypt’s earliest unified kings, built around 3000 BCE. Petrie, excavating in the 1920s, had wondered how so many people buried around a royal tomb could have died together without violence. He kept detailed notes and photographs, but he reported no clear fatal wounds. Most of the bodies were reburied. The skulls remained.
Campbell located those crania in Cambridge University’s Duckworth Collection and reassessed them with modern forensic methods. According to the study in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, the fractures Petrie appears to have treated as later damage are, in many cases, better understood as perimortem injuries: long, linear breaks severe enough to cause unconsciousness, internal bleeding and death. Some skulls also show sharp-force trauma, including a chopping wound to the eye area of one individual.
That does not settle every question. Campbell argues that the pattern supports retainer sacrifice, the killing of people attached to a ruler at the ruler’s death, but the exact method remains uncertain. Egyptian royal imagery often shows kings striking enemies with a mace, yet these fractures do not fit the depressed injuries that weapon would usually leave. A fall could produce linear fractures, but a fall hard enough to kill should often damage other bones as well, and the surviving excavation record does not strongly point that way.
What emerges most clearly is not a theatrical scene of ancient cruelty, but a bureaucracy of death. These were not anonymous masses in a pit. Campbell said Petrie found names and official titles on some grave markers, mostly lower- or mid-level officials and artisans. Their burials were simple chamber graves in ordered rows, often with ceramic vessels, small copper tools or ivory objects. Even in death, rank was sorted, labor recorded, service made material.
That is why the study lands so forcefully. It restores violence to a burial practice that had been partially flattened into ritual. It also returns attention to the people usually left in the margins of royal history: those who built, served, carried, made, and may have been required to follow a king further than loyalty should ever ask.
Marcus Azzopardi 
Harvey Jr.