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For nearly a century, dozens of skulls sat in a collection at the University of Cambridge, labeled as remains from the burial grounds of Egypt’s first kings.

A new forensic study has found that many of them carry injuries that likely killed their owners. The findings point to retainer sacrifice: servants and officials put to death when their ruler died, then buried around the royal tomb.

The archaeologist who first dug them up had seen the fractures. He just misread them.

A Century-Old Suspicion Without a Wound to Prove It

In the 1920s, British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie excavated the royal cemetery of Umm el-Qa’ab, at Abydos in southern Egypt. The first kings of a unified Egypt were buried there around 3000 B.C., about 500 years before the Great Pyramid.

Around their tombs, Petrie found rows of smaller graves, sometimes hundreds of them. So many people dying at the same moment as their king seemed impossible to explain by natural causes. He suspected they had been killed.

But he found no fatal wounds. Without that evidence, his theory stayed in dispute for 100 years.

Petrie reburied most of the bodies and kept only the skulls. Some ended up in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge. Bioarchaeologist Roselyn Campbell tracked down 46 of them and examined them with modern forensic methods.

Eighteen of the 46 Skulls Show Signs of Violence

Campbell found significant cranial trauma on 18 of the 46 skulls, or 39 percent.

Most of the injuries are linear fractures, thin cracks running across the skull. Petrie seems to have taken them for damage that occurred after burial. Today, forensic science recognizes them as injuries inflicted around the time of death.

“The injuries on the preserved crania are generally linear fractures, which would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death,” Campbell said in a statement from the journal.

Some of the 18 skulls also carry sharp-force trauma. One individual received a chopping blow to the eye.

What made the wounds is less obvious.

The weapon was probably not a mace

Egyptian kings are often shown smiting enemies with a mace. But a mace leaves depressed fractures, where a piece of skull is pushed inward. These skulls show something different.

Linear fractures usually come from a flat, wide object, or from a fall. A fall violent enough to crack a skull would likely have broken other bones, and Petrie’s photographs and notes record nothing of the kind.

“Based on comparative forensic and archaeological studies, the most likely implement would have been flat and relatively light, probably made out of something like wood rather than stone,” Campbell told Live Science.

That method surprised Jacobus van Dijk, an Egyptologist at the University of Groningen who was not involved in the study. Depictions of ritual killing on early wooden labels, he told Live Science, seem to show a kneeling victim with hands tied behind the back being stabbed in the chest.

Hundreds of Graves Around Three Rulers

The skulls come from graves surrounding the funerary complexes of three First Dynasty rulers: King Djer, King Djet and Meretneith, a woman who likely ruled Egypt.

The first king of the dynasty, Aha, was buried with only a few subsidiary graves. Djer, Djet and Meretneith had hundreds. By the start of the Second Dynasty, around 2730 B.C., such graves had all but disappeared.

“As far as we can tell, this particular type of retainer sacrifice seems to have ended with the close of the First Dynasty, which means it [lasted] around two centuries or possibly less,” Campbell told Live Science.

The other 28 skulls show no fatal injuries. Some of those people may have died naturally. Others may have been killed in ways that leave no mark on the skull, such as suffocation, or that would only show on the rest of the skeleton, which Petrie reburied.

An Afterlife Staff, or a Show of Power

Campbell sees two motives that may have overlapped.

“In many cultures, retainer sacrifice is practiced because of beliefs that the sacrificed individuals will continue to serve the ruler in some kind of afterlife, but retainer sacrifice can also be a visceral display of the ruler’s power,” she said. “Some retainers might have volunteered to die to achieve eternal life or honor, others may have been chosen or even forced.”

For van Dijk, the study strengthens a long-contested idea. “Dr Campbell’s research adds an important argument in support of scholars who, like myself, believe this custom was practised in Egypt in the early dynastic period,” he said.

Campbell would like to locate the reburied bodies and examine them. Her book on the subject, State-sanctioned Violence and Human Sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt, is forthcoming from Routledge.

Each subsidiary grave was a simple chamber in a row of dozens. Some held a coffin, and most contained a few ceramic vessels, along with small copper tools, projectile points or ivory figurines. Petrie found a few grave markers bearing names and titles, which mostly belonged to lower- and mid-level officials and artisans.

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