ARCE-DC: Death in the First Dynasty: Reassessing Human “Sacrifices”

Lecture Information

Ivory sandal label, King Den; © The Trustees of the British Museum

The first dynasty kings of a newly unified Egypt surrounded their royal funerary complexes at Abydos with the graves of court officials and artisans, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. These subsidiary graves were generally simple affairs, containing a few grave goods and a single body, sometimes with a stela naming the individual and his or her title.

Since these burials were excavated in the late 19th century, scholars have debated whether the individuals within these subsidiary burials were sacrificed to accompany their rulers into the afterlife, or buried close to their king after dying naturally.

The middle to high status of the individuals buried in the subsidiary graves, as well as their proximity to the deceased king and the architecture of the simple graves, led early excavators to assert that these graves were almost certainly sacrificial in nature. However, the apparent lack of physical trauma on the human remains has led other scholars to argue that sacrifice is an unlikely explanation, or at least an unsupported theory.

This lecture will present evidence recovered from the human remains themselves, and considers the archaeological and ideological context of these burials to complicate our understanding of first dynasty funerary practices.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Roselyn A. Campbell is a bioarchaeologist, anthropological archaeologist, and Egyptologist. Her interests broadly center on bioarchaeology and Egyptian archaeology, and her research specifically explores how ancient cultures define, understand, and enact violence within specific cultural and ideological parameters.

She also studies paleo-oncology, the history of cancer in human remains.

Her newest research project explores how player perceptions of gender in the Assassin’s Creed video games affect popular understandings of gender in the past.

Dr. Campbell earned a BA and an MA in anthropological archaeology and forensic anthropology at the University of Montana, and a PhD in archaeology from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also has a certificate in Egyptology from the University of Manchester in the UK.

Dr. Campbell has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Egypt, Jordan, Peru, Ethiopia, Spain, and the western United States. She is currently the Head Osteologist for projects in The Asasif Project and the Polish-Egyptian Mission at Deir el-Bahari in Egypt and the Khirbat al-Mukhayyat Project in Jordan.

From 2022 to 2024, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. Since 2023, she has been the Assistant Director of the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy.

Dr. Campbell has published multiple articles about her work on human sacrifice and violence in ancient Egypt, and on her work at Deir el-Bahari and Asasif. She was an editor for the volume entitled The Poetics of Violence in Afroeurasian Bioarchaeology, which was published by Springer in 2024.

About ARCE-DC:

ARCE DC is one of a dozen local chapters around the US and Canada that belong to the American Research Center in Egypt.

Its mission, like that of ARCE itself, is to support research on all aspects of Egyptian history and culture, foster a broader knowledge about Egypt, and strengthen American-Egyptian cultural ties.

Our chapter offers its own lectures, and sends email alerts to our members about Egyptology news and lectures online from around the world.