Abstract:
A study re-examining remains at Abydos in ancient Egypt has provided new skeletal evidence for the debate that members of the court may have been killed and buried with the First Dynasty rulers after their deaths. Rosalyn Campbell, an anthropologist at Purdue University, re-examined 46 skulls unearthed by archaeologist Flinders Petrie in the 1920s. Eighteen of them, or about 39 percent, showed potentially fatal cranial trauma that occurred near death.
The remains come from the necropolis of Umm El-Qa'ab in Abydos and date from approximately 3078 BC to 2900 BC. The tombs of early First Dynasty kings are surrounded by hundreds of ancillary tombs, and those buried are thought to have included palace officials, craftsmen and other members of the royal family. Because many of the tombs seemed to have been sealed at a similar time, Petrie had suspected that the men were killed after the king's death and continued to serve the ruler in the afterlife as "funeral attendants"; but no clear evidence of fatal trauma was found at the time, and this explanation has long been questioned.
Campbell found Petrie's preserved skull in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University and used modern forensic knowledge to reidentify the fractures. The most common is a linear fracture of the skull, and some skulls also suffer injuries caused by sharp objects, including a puncture wound to the head and a cut to the eye. Researchers believe that such fractures may lead to rapid coma, intracranial hemorrhage, and death in the absence of modern medical treatment; Petrie may have seen these cracks but misjudged them as natural damage caused by burial.
The exact cause of the trauma remains undetermined. Linear fractures may be caused by a blow with a wide, flat object, or they may result from a fall; they are different from the depressed fractures common in blunt force blows, so they cannot be used to determine what type of weapon was used to attack the deceased. The researchers pointed out that the clustering of similar injuries in the 18 injured skulls made it difficult for accidental falls to explain all the cases, but it was still not enough to prove alone that these people were executed or sacrificed as ritual sacrifices.
The study's sample was also significantly limited. The existing skulls only account for about 5% to 15% of the original number of people buried in each section of the relevant cemetery, and the remains are generally incomplete and lack other bones of the body that can correspond to the skulls; therefore, these 46 skulls may not represent all the people in the attached tombs. Others buried may have died of natural causes or may have suffered suffocation or other methods of death that would not leave traces on their bones. In forensic medicine, "near-death trauma" does not mean that the wound must have occurred at the moment of death. The determination time may span hours, or even weeks in extreme cases.
The study, published in Frontiers in Environmental Archeology, does not put an end to the funerary martyrdom debate, but it shows that reanalyzing archaeological data preserved a century ago may still change people's understanding of ancient society and royal burials. The researchers believe that the skull trauma adds evidence to Petrie's hypothesis, and also serves as a reminder that funerary practices around the tombs of Abydos may be more complex than the simple explanation that all the burial victims were killed at the same time.
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