Skulls of Civilians Buried Around Egypt's First Kings Reveal Evidence of Human Sacrifice 5,000 Years Ago

What 46 Ancient Egyptian Skulls Reveal About Human Sacrifice In Royal Tombs

Learn how modern forensics uncovered evidence that Egypt’s royal retainers may have been killed to serve their rulers in the afterlife.

New forensic evidence supports Egyptian "retainer sacrifice"

Fresh analysis of First Dynasty mass burials finds signs of fatal blunt force trauma on 39 percent of skulls...

Skulls Reveal Evidence of Human Sacrifice in Egypt 5,000 Years Ago

Royal tombs at Abydos were surrounded by numerous other burials. In the 1920s, an Egyptologist questioned whether all those people could have died naturally at the same time.

5,000-year-old skull fractures reveal human sacrifices in Ancient Egypt

A chopping wound above the eye and more carnage solve a mystery that stumped archeologists for a century.

Skulls of Civilians Buried Around Egypt's First Kings Reveal Evidence of Human Sacrifice 5,000 Years Ago

Illustrative generic image of a skull in a laboratory. (EvgeniyShkolenko/iStockphoto/Getty Images) Modern forensics gives us a new understanding of an ancient mystery. ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.

Forensic Science Exposes Human Sacrifice in Egypt's First Dynasty

More than a century after archaeologists first unearthed rows of mysterious graves around Egypt’s earliest royal tombs, modern forensic science has delivered a verdict that ancient historians have debated for generations: many of these people were almost certainly killed on purpose. A new study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reports that at least 39 percent of a sample of skulls recovered from the First Dynasty funerary comp…