Roselyn Campbell, an anthropology researcher at Purdue University, re-examined 46 skulls from the burials around Egypt’s earliest royal tombs and found 18 with injuries around the time of death that were likely fatal. That is 39% of the sample. Most of the damage is linear fractures running across the cranial vault, with a smaller number of sharp-force wounds.
The skulls come from the cemetery at Umm el-Qaab, near Abydos, where First Dynasty kings were buried about 5,000 years ago. Campbell’s paper appeared in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology on October 5, 2026.
The 46 crania from Umm el-Qaab
The sample is a specific, counted set. According to the Frontiers article, it consists of 46 preserved crania from the subsidiary burials at Umm el-Qaab, the small graves clustered around the royal tombs of the First Dynasty rulers Djer, Djet and Merneith, named alongside them in the sources. The skulls are held in the Duckworth Collection at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, a legacy of the early excavations at Abydos.
The people in the sample were of mixed sex, with no children and few older adults. Campbell argues that profile fits court administrators and officials rather than a random cross-section of a village. The National’s report describes the dead as lower- and mid-level officials, artisans and household staff. The sources read for this article do not break the 18 down by ruler, so how many of them lay near Djer, Djet or Merneith is not stated.
Perimortem fractures behind the fatal-trauma count
The word “fatal” here is an inference from the injury type and not a recorded cause of death for each person. The Frontiers paper uses the term perimortem for the 18 skulls, meaning damage inflicted at or around the time of death rather than later in the ground, and says the linear fractures across the parietal bones point to potentially fatal outcomes through hematoma or bleeding inside the skull. Live Science reports the same set as skulls with “signs of trauma that were likely fatal.”
Campbell’s account of the mechanism is that linear fractures occur when the cranium strikes or is struck by a relatively large object. The National quotes her saying such fractures would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding and death. From the fracture pattern, she judged the weapon to have been flat and relatively light, probably wood rather than stone.
Not every injury is a blunt blow. The National reports that some skulls also carry sharp-force trauma, including chopping injuries, so the 18 are not a single pattern of damage. The Frontiers summary likewise lists several sharp-force injuries beside the dominant linear fractures. That mix is why the paper treats the group as evidence of deliberate killing and not as the product of one accident or one kind of weapon, though Campbell has stated the weapon inference for the fractures only.
The same skulls had been looked at before. Campbell’s reanalysis proposes that Flinders Petrie, the archaeologist who excavated the cemetery, saw some of these fractures but read them as damage that happened after burial. Modern trauma analysis, an understanding of how bone breaks once buried, and imaging allowed the injuries to be reclassified as perimortem.
Retainer sacrifice and what the skulls cannot show
Campbell defines retainer sacrifice as the killing of people close to a ruler on the ruler’s death, sometimes voluntarily for perceived service in the afterlife and sometimes through coercion or force, as The National reports. The skull evidence cannot separate those two routes, because a fractured cranium records how a person died and nothing of the choice that preceded it.
The result bears on a long argument. Archaeologists have inferred retainer sacrifice at Abydos from the layout of the graves alone: hundreds of small burials arranged around royal tombs. Wikipedia’s summary of earlier counts cites 318 retainers buried in Djer’s tomb and 269 in the enclosures around it, and 174 around Djet’s. Against figures like those, 46 skulls is a small sample.
Campbell acknowledges that limit. According to a roundup of how outlets covered the paper, she noted the small sample size and the unknown fate of other retainers, and the Guardian stressed that for skulls without trauma it cannot be certain they were sacrificed. The practice itself appears limited to the First Dynasty, lasting roughly two centuries or less and ending by the Second Dynasty.
Jacobus van Dijk, an Egyptologist at the University of Groningen, told Live Science the work adds an important argument for those who believe the custom existed in early Egypt. He expressed surprise at blunt-force killing, since depictions show knife wounds. Campbell’s findings are also set to appear in her forthcoming book, State-sanctioned Violence and Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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