The Poetics of Human Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt

Studies of violence in ancient Egypt tend to focus on dramatic images of the king trampling enemies in his chariot, tales of painful and lethal punishments, and mythological underpinnings of Egyptian structures of power and kingship. Because so much of our evidence from ancient Egypt derives from state- or elite-sponsored imagery, text, and architecture, however, such approaches are necessarily limited to violence as the Egyptian kings wanted us to see it: a productive tool of ideological power and virility, and proof that the king was willing and able to defend and protect Egypt and its people. This chapter explores the retainer (also known as attendant or companion) sacrifices of the First Dynasty (c.3078–2900 BCE) at Abydos. Interred in hundreds of simple, apparently hasty graves surrounding the royal funerary complexes of this period, some of the retainers show evidence of traumatic death, while other do not. This chapter will explore how the Egyptians themselves may have conceptualized violence and non-violence in the case of the retainer sacrifices, and seeks to understand how both physical and spiritual violence may have been used to reify social groups and hierarchies.