Egypt's First Kings May Have Been Buried With Human Sacrifices - ScienceAlert

Illustrative generic image of a skull in a laboratory. (EvgeniyShkolenko/iStockphoto/Getty Images)

You might have read somewhere that in ancient Egypt, royalty were often buried with people sacrificed to serve them in the afterlife, but archaeologists aren't actually so sure about that. When British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated graves surrounding the tombs of ancient Egyptian First Dynasty kings in the 1920s, he found the remains of many more people – hundreds, in some cases. At the time, he suspected the people in these satellite graves could have been sacrificed shortly after each king's death, in what is known as a retainer sacrifice. But Petrie was unable to find evidence for how these people died, a gap that has left this theory open to doubt. Archaeologist Roselyn Campbell, of Purdue University in the US, has been revisiting Petrie's work with a modern forensic approach, confirming that 18 of the 46 skulls Petrie preserved and brought back to England show signs of potentially lethal injuries. She presents her findings in a new paper, published today in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.