Reanalysis of 100-year-old Abydos retainer skulls finds perimortem cranial trauma

November 08, 2026EgyptBioarchaeologyNew ResearchShare

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Key facts

• The material comes from subsidiary graves surrounding the First and Second Dynasty royal funerary enclosures at Umm el-Qa'ab, Abydos, where court officials and craftspeople were buried around the burials of Egypt's earliest kings.
• Flinders Petrie excavated the remains in the early 1920s and initially interpreted them as retainer sacrifice, though he found no evidence of lethal trauma; he proposed victims were stunned with a sandbag and buried alive.
• Petrie kept only the crania and reburied the postcranial remains in a pit within the Shunet el-Zebib, limiting subsequent analysis.
• Bioarchaeologist Roslyn Campbell reassessed the crania, which had not been examined for cause of death in over 100 years, using modern osteoarchaeology and forensic methods.
• She identified linear fractures running across the top back of the cranium in multiple individuals, whose characteristics indicate trauma occurred around the time of death.
• The fractures are not uniform: not all examined crania show them, indicating varied treatment within the burial ritual.
• Many of the crania carry paraffin wax applied around the fractures, showing Petrie likely saw them but lacked the training to interpret their timing.
• Post-Petrie research indicates some subsidiary burials were constructed and closed individually rather than all at once, partially undermining the mass-sacrifice interpretation.
• Early 20th-century arguments for live burial based on outstretched arms and open mouths are now attributed to natural body movement during decay.
• Strangulation remains a possible but unproven cause of death; DNA and isotope work is hampered by the loss of postcranial remains and restrictions on destructive sampling.

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