Chapter VII in: Jan N. Bremmer (ed.

), The Strange World of Human

Sacrifice. – Studies in the History and Anthropology of Religion, Vol.
1 (Leuven, Peeters, 2007), 135–155.

This is a pre-publication version, all but identical to the printed

version except for the pagination. Red numbers within brackets
indicate the beginning of a page in the published book.

[135]

Retainer Sacrifice in Egypt and in Nubia

JACOBUS VAN DIJK

‘The truth of the doctrine of cultural (or historical—it is

the same thing) relativism is that we can never
apprehend another people’s or another period’s
imagination neatly, as though it were our own. The
falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely
apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at
least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly
ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering
1
glosses that connect us to it but through them.’

Human sacrifice has long been, and perhaps still is, a somewhat
controversial subject among Egyptologists. The ancient
Egyptians have often been considered too civilized for such a

1
C. Geertz, ‘Found in Translation: On the Social History of Moral
Imagination’, in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive
Anthropology (New York, 1983) 44.
2 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

barbaric custom. As the Canadian anthropologist and

archaeologist Bruce Trigger put it, ‘the cruel forms of human
sacrifice practised by the Aztecs have caused many
Egyptologists to wonder if such people can really be considered
to have been civilized’.2 Invariably, a famous episode from an
early New Kingdom literary text, the Westcar Papyrus, is cited
in this context.3 It is a collection of fairy tales set in a distant
past, the time of the Old Kingdom pharaohs. One of the stories
tells of the magical skills of a man called Djedi, who is able to
reconnect [136] a severed head and restore the victim to life.
King Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid at Giza, is keen
to have a demonstration of this and gives orders to fetch a
prisoner and use him as a guinea pig, but Djedi tells the King
that ‘it is forbidden to do such a thing to the noble cattle’, i.e.
human beings. A duck, a goose, and a bull are then used instead.
King Cheops is clearly depicted here as a barbarian who does
not acknowledge the value of human life.
In modern popular imagination the idea of the pharaoh as a
cruel despot is still very much alive. In many a film or novel the
pharaoh has the people who have built his pyramid buried alive
with him in order to ensure that nobody will disclose the secret
of its construction and rob his tomb, and these people then often
return as vengeful mummies risen from the dead. Of course this
is all nonsense, but on the other hand it cannot be denied that the
custom of having the King’s servants killed and buried with him
in order to serve him in the afterlife did actually exist in Ancient

2
B.G. Trigger, Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context (Cairo,
1993) 84.
3
A.M. Blackman, The Story of King Kheops and the Magicians.
Transcribed from Papyrus Westcar (Berlin Papyrus 3033), ed. W.V.
Davies (Reading, 1988). The text has often been translated; recent
English translations are available in M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian
Literature I (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1973) 215–22 and
R.B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian
Poems 1940–1640 BC (Oxford, 1997) 102–27.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 3

Egypt, albeit only for a brief period at the very beginning of

pharaonic civilization.
Two main forms of human sacrifice can be distinguished.
On the one hand there is the ritual killing of a human being,
either as a regular or as an exceptional form of the offering cult.
In this case human beings – usually, though not always,
convicted criminals or prisoners of war – are sacrificed to the
gods in order to maintain or re-establish cosmic order and to
emphasize the role of the King as its main guarantor. In some
cases this type of human sacrifice may be no more than a
ritualized form of the legal death penalty.4 On the other hand
there is the practice of retainer sacrifice, where the death of the
king is followed by the killing of people who are supposed to
accompany him to the hereafter.5 It is on this latter custom that
we shall focus here, although it is possible that the two forms of
human sacrifice may sometimes overlap, for example if, as
sometimes has been suggested, prisoners of war were selected to
be killed on the occasion of the royal funeral.6

[137] The earliest instances of retainer sacrifice from Egypt

appear to date from the last phases of Egyptian prehistory,
particularly the Naqada II (Gerzean) period (c. 3500–3200 BC).
In some cemeteries there is evidence for dismemberment of the

4
See for the various forms of cultic human sacrifice the contribution
by H. te Velde to this volume.
5
Sometimes rather inappropriately called sati-burial, after the Indian
rite of widow-burning, see e.g. H. Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-
Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (1886, repr. Ware,
Hertfordshire, 1996) 878–83, s.v. suttee. As Trigger has pointed out,
‘in India, where sati was widespread, retainer sacrifice is unreported’,
JNES 28 (1969) 257.
6
On the various problems of interpretation of archaeological and
anthropological data in this context see the special volume of the
journal Archéo-Nil (10, 2002) devoted to Le sacrifice humain en
contexte funéraire.
4 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

body, a burial custom not attested in earlier times. Parts of the

body were buried or reburied separately; in a number of cases
the skull has been detached from the body and in a tomb at
Naqada several skulls and long bones have been carefully laid
out along the walls of the tomb. Evidence of post mortem
decapitation has recently come to light not only at
Hierakonpolis7 but also at near-by Adaïma, where at least two
cases are known where the victim had been decapitated after his
throat had been slit.8 These examples have been interpreted as
cases of ‘self-sacrifice’ and the beginning of the practice of
retainer sacrifice,9 but caution is needed since the status in life
of the victims remains unknown.
Firmer and more substantial evidence of retainer sacrifice
comes from the royal burial grounds of the Early Dynastic
Period at Abydos. The kings of Dynasties 0 and I, when the
centralized Egyptian state was formed, as well as those of the
second part of Dynasty II were buried here. The unification of
the country under one central government is traditionally
ascribed to Menes, the legendary first king of the First Dynasty,
but although military operations may ultimately have played a
decisive role, this unification is now usually seen as the result of
a gradual process which took several decades. The identity of
‘Menes’, whose name does not appear in contemporary records,
is still uncertain; he is most often identified either with Narmer,
who is depicted as king of both Upper and Lower Egypt on a
famous slate palette from Hierakonpolis now in the Cairo
Museum, or with his successor Aha.10 Be this as it may, retainer

7
R. Friedman et al., ‘Preliminary Report on Field Work at
Hierakonpolis 1996-1998’, JARCE 36 (1999) 1-35.
8
B. Midant-Reynes, E. Crubézy and T. Janin, ‘The Predynastic site of
Adaïma’, Egyptian Archaeology 9 (1996) 13–5.
9
Midant-Reynes, in I. Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient
Egypt (Oxford, 2000) 53–4.
10
On this debate see T.A.H. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt
(London and New York, 1999) 67–8.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 5

sacrifice in the necropolis of Abydos is first attested in the [138]

burial complex of King Aha and continues to be a feature of all
royal tombs of the First Dynasty. The burial complexes of these
kings consist not only of the tomb proper, an impressive mud-
brick structure built on the high desert which was once covered
by a rectangular tumulus,11 but also of a separate funerary
enclosure situated nearer the edge of the cultivation.12 The
necropolis has suffered extensively both from looting and from
less than careful digging by early excavators, but the work
carried out by Petrie in 1899–1903 and 1922 and the
excavations of the German and American missions presently
working there have nevertheless yielded important results.
Both the tomb and the funerary enclosure are surrounded by
rows of small square or rectangular subsidiary graves each
containing one burial, usually in a wooden coffin.13 The tomb of
Aha had three parallel rows of 36 subsidiary graves containing
the skeletal remains of young males, none of whom was older
than 20–25 years. This uniform age is a strong indication that
they were all killed simultaneously, apparently by
strangulation.14 It is interesting to note that the remains of at

11
G. Dreyer, ‘Zur Rekonstruktion der Oberbauten der Königsgräber
der 1. Dynastie in Abydos’, MDAIK 47 (1991) 93–104.
12
See Wilkinson’s chapter 7 for a survey of the royal mortuary
architecture of this period.
13
The following information on individual tombs and enclosures has
chiefly been gained from Petrie’s excavation reports; cf. also W.B.
Emery, Archaic Egypt (Harmondsworth, 1961) 62, 67–8, 73, 81, 85,
90, 135–8. For a detailed analysis of the subsidiary graves at Abydos
see G.A. Reisner, The Development of the Egyptian Tomb down to the
Accession of Cheops (Cambridge, Mass., Oxford and London, 1936)
75–121, who also assessed the problem of the retainer sacrifices, 117–
21; cf. M.A. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs: The Prehistoric
Foundations of Egyptian Civilization (London and Henley-on-
Thames, 1980) 275–9.
14
As suggested by a recent re-examination of the victims’ teeth by
6 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

least seven young lions were found near one of these burials.15
Further confirmation of the practice of retainer sacrifice [139]
comes from the very recent excavation of Aha’s funerary
enclosure by the American mission.16 Here the expedition
uncovered six subsidiary burials containing the skeletons of
what appear to be court officials, servants and artisans.
Although the graves had been looted they still contained
funerary goods such as jars with the royal seal of Aha and
precious items of ivory and lapis lazuli jewellery, indicating that
these people were no mere servants but persons of some
standing. That they were all buried at the same time is made
probable by the fact that the wooden roofs over the individual
graves were covered by a continuous layer of mud plaster laid
down over all the graves very soon after the enclosure was
constructed.
Aha was succeeded by Djer, whose tomb was surrounded
by the graves of no fewer than 31717 individuals, while a further

Nancy Lovell, see K.A. Bard, in I. Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of
Ancient Egypt, 71. Strangulation, besides cutting of the throat and
interment alive, has also been observed in the much later retainer
sacrifices at Ballana and Qustul, where the remains of a rope were
found around the necks of some individuals, see A.M. el Batrawi,
Mission archéologique de Nubie 1929–1934. Report on the Human
Remains (Cairo, 1935) 79. In a scene in the New Kingdom Theban
tomb of Mentuherkhepshef, which I hope to discuss elsewhere, two
Nubians are put to death by strangulation as part of the funerary rites
of the tomb-owner.
15
Three young lions, two of whom wore amulets, were found in
individual sand burials in the Napatan non-royal cemetery at Sanam in
Lower Nubia, see F.Ll. Griffith, LAAA 10 (1923) 81–2.
16
The find was officially announced on 14 March 2004 and is as yet
unpublished. The details given here are based on the press release
issued by New York University on 16 March 2004 and the report in
The New York Times of that day.
17
The number given by Emery is 338.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 7

242 were found buried around his funerary enclosure, a total of

559 individuals, among whom were a considerable number of
women. Many of these subsidiary graves were originally
marked by simple tombstones inscribed with the names of their
occupants, a further indication that these people were not just
nameless slaves. Not all of the subsidiary burials are necessarily
retainer sacrifices, however. In the case of the burials at Djer’s
tomb, Reisner, after careful consideration of the archeological
and constructional evidence, considered 63 cases probable and a
further 99 possible. After Djer the numbers gradually decrease.
The tomb of his successor Djet (Wadji) had 174 subsidiary
burials (assessed by Reisner as 14 probable and 99 possible
cases of retainer sacrifice); his funerary enclosure counted a
further 161. The tomb of Queen Merytneith, who appears to
have acted as regent during the minority of her son Den,
contained 41 (33 probably sacrificial) subsidiary graves, and
Den’s own tomb had 133 (40 probable, 83 possible), while his
ritual enclosure, perhaps originally associated with Merytneith,
counted 77. The tomb of the next king, Andjib, was surrounded
by 64 poorly constructed graves; his enclosure, if he had one, is
as yet unidentified.
The last two kings to be buried in the First Dynasty
necropolis at Abydos were Semerkhet and Qaa. Semerkhet’s
tomb is particularly interesting in that the 68 subsidiary graves
have been constructed directly around the king’s own burial
chamber and were almost [140] certainly covered by the same
roofing timbers and superstructure, a further strong indication
that these burials were simultaneous with the royal funeral
(Reisner considers all 68 burials as probable cases of retainer
sacrifice). Some of the retainers buried were dwarfs, as
evidenced by skeletal remains as well as depictions on some of
the seven stelae found in the tomb. Semerkhet’s funerary
enclosure is unknown, although it has been identified with the
so-called ‘Western Mastaba’, a building neighbouring (and
similar to) the enclosure of Den; if so, there do not seem to have
been any subsidiary burials. Qaa’s tomb contained only 26
8 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

subsidiary graves which were again constructed around the core

of the royal tomb itself, and are therefore very probably all cases
of retainer sacrifice; his enclosure has not yet been identified.
Elsewhere in Egypt monumental funerary structures are also
sometimes accompanied by subsidiary graves of sacrificed
retainers. In the Early Dynastic cemeteries of the capital
Memphis, at Giza and Saqqara, several cases have been found.
At Nezlet Batran, near Giza, 56 subsidiary graves were found
around a large rectangular mud-brick structure with a palace
façade surrounded by an enclosure wall, the so-called mastaba
Giza V, dated by Petrie to the reign of Djet (Wadji). The
interpretation of this massive building is uncertain; it may be the
tomb of Djet’s mother or one of his wives, or possibly a
cenotaph of Djet himself,18 a symbolic tomb representing the
king’s continued presence in the north. The same problem arises
with the huge palace façade mastabas of the First Dynasty found
by Emery at Saqqara. Emery believed these to be the true royal
tombs of the early rulers of Egypt, whereas he saw Petrie’s
Abydos tombs as royal cenotaphs erected in the sacred domain
of the god Osiris, a view still held by some scholars today.19 The
size of the Saqqara mastabas in particular is an important
argument: they are much larger and much more imposing than
the tombs at Abydos, that is, if the funeral enclosures belonging
to the latter are left out of the equation. This makes it rather
unlikely that the Saqqara mastabas belong to high officials even
if these were of royal blood themselves, for as Michael Hoffman
has pointed out, it is hardly conceivable that they would have
been allowed to outshine the king by the grandeur of their
funerary monuments, and there is much to be said for
Hoffman’s [141] solution that at least some of the Saqqara

18
Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs, 280.
19
See W.B. Emery, Great Tombs of the First Dynasty II (London,
1954) 1–4; Hoffman, 280–88; Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt, 259–
60.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 9

mastabas are in fact the northern cenotaphs of the kings buried

at Abydos.
The question is not without interest for the subject of this
article, for if the Saqqara monuments did not belong to kings, it
would mean that even private individuals, albeit of the highest
rank, could have retainer sacrifices with their burials. Mastaba
3504 at Saqqara, associated with King Djet, which is nearly
twice as large as the king’s tomb at Abydos, contained 62
retainer burials. Mastaba 3503, associated with Queen
Merytneith, also had 20 subsidiary burials which were largely
undisturbed and contained not only the remains of the sacrificed
servants, but also ‘the objects denoting their particular service to
their royal mistress, such as model boats with her shipmaster,
paint pots with her artist, stone vessels and copper tools with her
vase maker, pots of every type with her potter, etc.’20 Four
subsidiary graves were found adjoining mastaba 3500, dated to
the reign of Qaa, which according to Emery, ‘all showed
evidence of having been buried at the same time’.21
At Abu Rawash, a little to the north of Giza, at least two of
the First Dynasty mastabas excavated by Montet in 1913–14
(nos. I and VII) were flanked by rows of subsidiary graves
similar to the ones found at Giza and Saqqara.22 At tomb I, dated
to the reign of Den, there were seven, each of them covered with
a miniature tumulus and marked with a small stela. The contents
had been disturbed in antiquity, but some of the graves still
contained skeletal material and remains of wooden coffins; the
surviving grave goods consisted mainly of pottery and stone
vessels. In one of the graves the relatively well-preserved coffin
contained not only a human skeleton but also (unspecified)
animal bones. A similar arrangement, this time of eight burials,

20
Emery, Archaic Egypt, 66–8 and 137–9.
21
Archaic Egypt, 90.
22
P. Montet, ‘Tombeaux de la Ière et de la IVe dynasties à Abou-
Roach’, Kêmi 7 (1938) 11–69.
10 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

was found at Tomb VII, also from the time of Den, although the
superstructure was no longer extant here. The tombs at Abu
Rawash are smaller than those at Saqqara and must have
belonged to members of the elite, perhaps of the royal family.
The grave goods are of the same type and quality as those at
Saqqara and presumably came from the same royal
workshops.23 There is no [142] certain archaeological evidence
that we are dealing with retainer sacrifice here, but the similarity
with the arrangements at Saqqara and Abydos suggests that this
is indeed the case. This means that at this time retainer sacrifice
was not an exclusively royal prerogative.
The kings of the Second Dynasty initially broke with the
tradition of having themselves buried in the ancestral cemetery
at Abydos; instead, they moved to Saqqara. Many kings of this
dynasty are ephemeral rulers of whom little beyond their names
is known. The tombs of only two of these kings,
Hetepsekhemwy and Ninetjer, have been identified with
reasonable certainty. They are of a new type, with a very long
underground gallery cut into the bedrock and containing a large
number of rectangular niches. The superstructures of these
tombs have disappeared completely and the underground parts
were emptied out long ago.24 Later in the history of the dynasty
the kings returned to Abydos. The first to do so was Peribsen,
who built a tomb similar to those of his First Dynasty
predecessors. No subsidiary burials have been found with it, and
although Reisner thought that such burials ‘in the main tomb
continued to be made’, he admitted that neither their number nor
their placing could be determined.25 The last king of the
dynasty, Khasekhemwy, built a tomb unlike any of the others at
23
Cf. A. Klasens, OMRO 42 (1961) 108.
24
The same applies to a possible further Second Dynasty royal tomb
recently discovered at Saqqara, which was reused and extended first at
the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty and then again in the Late Period;
see M.J. Raven et al., JEOL 37 (2001–2002) 95–100.
25
Reisner, Tomb Development, 125.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 11

Abydos; it looks like a mud-brick adaptation of the Saqqara

gallery tombs. It is an oblong structure of about 70 m with the
royal tomb proper in the centre; a sloping entrance corridor
leads to a series of 40 niches on either side of the compound,
with a further 9 in the middle, behind the royal tomb. According
to Reisner, ‘the central burial-complex … certainly contained
two or more sati-burials, and it is to be presumed that other
chambers … contained other sati-burials. The numbers of these
burials would probably not have exceeded ten or fifteen’.26 If
there were [143] retainer sacrifices at these Late Second
Dynasty tombs, it is likely that they also existed in the earlier
gallery tombs at Saqqara, but it should be stressed that there is
no evidence for any such burials in either location; indeed, it is
usually supposed that the custom died out after the First
Dynasty. On the other hand, the function of the niches in the
walls of the galleries, usually assumed to be magazines, has yet
to be determined and it has to be admitted that their arrangement
resembles the rows of subsidiary graves along the exterior walls
of First Dynasty royal tombs.
Two further possible cases of retainer sacrifice in Egypt
must be mentioned here, both from the Nile Delta. In the Late
Middle Kingdom stratum at Tell ed-Dab‘a (c. 1680–1660 BC), a

26
Reisner, Tomb Development, 128. It should be pointed out that
Reisner uses the term sati-burial not only for sacrificed retainers in
subsidiary graves, but also for wives of the king who were killed to
accompany him to the other world and who were buried within the
royal tomb itself. As far as I can see, however, there is no hard
evidence for this practice in the Early Dynastic cemeteries at either
Abydos or Saqqara. It is true that the tomb of Djer introduced the
multiple-room substructure (Reisner, 350ff.) and that a human arm
bedecked with precious jewellery, thought to have belonged to the
body of a queen, was found in a robbers’ hole in the wall of the tomb,
but the arm may equally well have belonged to Djer himself and a
queen of Djer called Herneith appears to have been the owner of the
large mastaba 3507 at Saqqara.
12 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

Canaanite settlement was found which was characterized,

among other things, by donkey burials, usually a pair of them,
near the entrance of the tomb. In three cases human bodies were
also found outside the tomb, in front of and facing the entrance;
in one instance two completely disarticulated bodies were found
together with five donkeys and an ox. To Van den Brink these
circumstances ‘strongly suggest that the dead were intentionally
killed and buried together with the owner of the tomb in front of
which they were buried. Probably they were servants who
followed their master to the Next World’.27 This interpretation
has been called into question, however. The skeletons actually
appear to predate the tomb in front of which they were found.
They probably belong to a multiple burial such as have been
found in earlier strata at Tell ed-Dab‘a, which was disturbed
when the tomb above them was dug out.28
In 1978, a team from the University of Mansura carried out
excavations at Tell el-Balamun, in the far north of the Nile
Delta. Unfortunately only a very brief preliminary report has
been published so far,29 and many intriguing questions must
remain unresolved for the [144] time being. Most of the finds
appear to date from the Late Period, but there is also a mastaba-
like structure of a ‘much earlier’ date. It contains a large T-
shaped room; at one end of the transverse room were found the

27
E.C.M. van den Brink, Tombs and Burial Customs at Tell el-Dab‘a
(Vienna, 1982) 48–50.
28
M. Bietak, Tell el-Dab‘a V: Ein Friedhofsbezirk der Mittleren
Bronzezeitkultur mit Totentempel und Siedlungsschichten, Teil I
(Vienna, 1991) 58, with figs. 24–25 on pp. 52–3. P. Montet, the
excavator of Tanis, which he believed was the Hyksos capital Avaris,
claimed that he had found ‘Canaanite’ human sacrifices (as part of
foundation rituals) there as well, but his interpretations have since
been convincingly refuted, see P. Brissaud, ‘Les prétendus sacrifices
humains de Tanis’, Cahiers de Tanis 1 (1987) 129–44.
29
F. Abd el-Malek Ghattas, ‘Tell el-Balamoun 1978 (Fouilles de
l’Université de Mansoura)’, ASAE 68 (1982) 45–9.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 13

skeletons of two individuals, whose faces had been covered by

crude masks made of gold foil. At the opposite end of the same
room were ‘further skeletons’, but without any trappings. More
skeletons were found in the long room taking off from the centre
and these had a circular hole in the front of the skull, just above
the forehead, leading the excavator to suspect that they had been
‘systematically, or even ritually’ killed by a blow with a blunt
instrument in order to let them follow the individuals wearing
the gold masks into the hereafter. More skeletons were found in
another room in the tomb; the only objects found were pottery,
which unfortunately has not been included in the report,
depriving us of a ready means to date this curious ensemble. It is
difficult to assess this find; it is not even certain how many
skeletons there were and how many of them had pierced skulls.
The method by which these people were killed has not been
observed before in clear cases of retainer sacrifice, and other
interpretations are also possible. Moreover, the date of the tomb
is uncertain; although the excavator thought it was much earlier
than the Late Period, it is quite possible that it is in fact later,
perhaps as late as Roman.30

In Nubia, retainer sacrifice is a recurring phenomenon from at

least the Classic Kerma Period (c. 1750–1500 BC) to the time of
the kingdoms of Ballana and Qustul (5th/6th century AD).31 The
kings of Kerma, just south of the Third Cataract, were buried in
very large tumulus tombs which were accompanied by massive
mud-brick mortuary chapels. The tombs, excavated by G.A.

30
Cf. the use of gold leaf on (parts of) the faces of Roman mummies,
W.A. Daszewski, in M.L. Bierbrier (ed.), Portraits and Masks. Burial
Customs in Roman Egypt (London, 1997) 63.
31
Cf. the brief surveys in e.g. B.G. Trigger, Nubia under the Pharaohs
(London, 1976) 89–96; W.Y. Adams, Nubia, Corridor to Africa
(London, 1977) 198–9, 203–5; D.A. Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush:
The Napatan and Meroitic Empires (London, 1996) 88–91.
14 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

Reisner shortly before World War I,32 contained not only large
quantities of all sorts of luxury objects such as furniture, model
ships, pottery, jewellery, and weapons, but also various
sacrificial animals as well as the [145] skeletons of sacrificed
human beings who had apparently been buried alive. One of the
largest tumuli contained the bodies of at least 322 people, a
great many of them female, perhaps members of the royal
harem. Retainer sacrifice was not just a royal prerogative here,
however, for smaller numbers of victims have also been found
in subsidiary graves belonging to court officials, dug into the
royal tumulus itself. These massive royal burial sites evidently
represent the Kingdom of Kerma at its most powerful. In the
northern parts of the cemetery human sacrifices are less in
evidence. Reisner ascribed this difference to a period of decline,
but Adams has suggested that it may instead reflect the period of
development leading up to the cultural heyday of Kerma.33
Neither the A-Group culture which preceded it nor the C-Group
culture of Lower Nubia which was partly contemporaneous with
Kerma appear to have known retainer sacrifice, although
Kerma-type burials with smaller numbers of victims have been
found in the region where the two overlap, near the Second
Cataract, at Mirgissa,34 where evidence for cultic human
sacrifice, briefly discussed elsewhere in this volume, has also
been found, and at Ukma.35
During the Egyptian New Kingdom, Nubia was an Egyptian
colony governed by ‘The King’s Son of Kush’, the Egyptian
viceroy. It was dominated politically, economically and
culturally by Egypt, which also meant that ‘slaves were
protected from grim Nubian customs such as retainer

32
G.A. Reisner, Excavations at Kerma I–V, Harvard African Studies
V–VI (Cambridge, Mass, 1923).
33
Adams, Nubia, 212–3.
34
A. Vila, in J. Vercoutter, Mirgissa I (Paris, 1970) 223–305.
35
Vila, Le cimetière kermaïque d’Ukma Ouest (Paris 1987).
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 15

sacrifice’.36 By the end of the New Kingdom Egypt had lost

control over Nubia, and not much is known about the period
which follows; it is not until c. 850 BC that the archaeological
evidence becomes more abundant again. Egyptian religious
traditions, and especially the cult of the god Amun at Gebel
Barkal, appear to have been preserved among the elite. This may
explain why retainer sacrifice does not seem to have been
practiced in the royal cemeteries at Kurru and Nuri, near the
capital city Napata at Gebel Barkal, although sacrificial burials
of animals, especially horses and guardian dogs, are common
there. The earlier tombs at Kurru were covered by tumuli, but
from the reign of Piye (Piankhy) onwards the kings both here
and at Nuri erected pyramids with adjacent mortuary chapels
over their tombs. Piye is the king who [146] invaded Egypt and
whose successors ruled over it for close to a century as the
Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Both in their inscriptions and in their
monuments they portray themselves as ‘more Egyptian than the
Egyptians’.
The period of Nubian rule over Egypt came to an end in 657
BC, when King Tanutamani fled to his native country before the
plundering troops of the Assyrian King Assurbanipal. The kings
continued to be buried in the cemeteries of Napata (chiefly
Nuri), however, and it was not until after Arkamaniqo (c. 270–
260 BC) decided to move the royal cemetery much further to the
south to Meroe, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, that we
see a revival of the ancient practice of retainer sacrifice.37 The
first kings and queens were buried in the existing elite cemetery
at Meroe South, but the later North Cemetery is the true royal
necropolis with no fewer than thirty-eight royal pyramid tombs.
Queens and members of the court elite were buried in the
adjacent West Cemetery. The last royal tomb, the owner of
which is unidentified, dates from c. AD 320. Reisner, who

36
Trigger, Nubia under the Pharaohs, 130.
37
Adams, Nubia, 308–9.
16 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

excavated these cemeteries, stated that evidence of ‘sati-burial’

was found in almost all of these tombs, but on the basis of his
published reports it is now thought that he ‘exaggerated the
frequency of the phenomenon’.38 Nevertheless, it is certain that
at least sixteen tombs (five kings, a queen, a prince, and a
further eight of unknown status) dating from the first century BC
onwards contained additional sacrificial burials, with a
maximum of seven in any one tomb. Here too, however, human
interments are outnumbered by those of horses, dogs, and later,
camels.
In the post-Meroitic period (4th–6th century AD) ‘royal’
cemeteries are found at el-Hobagi, some 75 km upstream from
Meroe, north of the Sixth Cataract. The exact status of the
tumulus graves found there is not certain; Patrice Lenoble, the
excavator of the site, sees them as the direct successors of the
royal tombs of Meroe and as proof that Meroitic culture
continued after the political decline of Meroe itself, but others
prefer to view them as the tombs of local chiefs.39 Whatever the
truth may be, it seems certain that these peo-[147]ple saw
themselves as kings, as Lenoble’s analysis of the grave goods
shows. But, although vast quantities of weaponry were found in
these tombs, only one of them contained a horse burial and no
human sacrifices were found at all.40
Large tumuli of the post-Meroitic period are also present in
many other sites, both in the north (Qasr Ibrim, Ballana, Qustul,
Gemai, Firka, Kosha, Wawa) and further south, from Tanqasi

38
Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush, 89.
39
P. Lenoble and N.M. Sharif, ‘Barbarians at the gates? The royal
mounds of El Hobagi and the end of Meroe’, Antiquity 66 (1992),
626–35, and the comment on this paper by P.L. Shinnie and J.H.
Robertson in Antiquity 67 (1993) 895–9. See also Lenoble, ‘Le rang
des inhumés sous tertre à enceinte à El Hobagi’, Meroitic Newsletter
25 (1994) 89–124.
40
D.A. Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia. Pagans, Christians
and Muslims along the Middle Nile (London, 2002) 41; 44.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 17

and Zuma, near Gebel Barkal, to Gebel Qisi, south of the Sixth
Cataract. Most of the latter sites are unexcavated; limited work
by Shinnie at Tanqasi has not revealed human sacrifices.41 By
contrast, clear evidence of the custom has emerged from the
huge burial mounds at Ballana and Qustul in Lower Nubia,
discovered in the early 1930s by Emery and Kirwan.42 These
two places, situated on opposite sides of the Nile just north of
the Egyptian-Sudanese border, constitute the most important
sites of the so-called X-Group Culture, nowadays usually
referred to as the Ballana Culture. The average height of the
tumuli is about 4.5 m, with a diameter of between 4 and 12 m,
but the royal burial mounds are much larger, the largest
measuring some 77 m in diameter and 12 m high. Concealed
underneath them is a long sloping corridor, usually from the
east, which leads to a number of barrel-vaulted, mud-brick
rooms constructed in pits cut out of the bedrock. Their massive
size as well as the opulence of their contents make these tombs
stand out as ‘the only symbolic representations of state authority
which we are able to recognize in the post-Meroitic era’.43
Several of the royal tombs were undisturbed and full of
archaeological treasures such as wooden, bronze, and iron
furniture, bronze and silver vessels, lamps, jewellery, tools, and
weapons. Sacrificial victims, both animals and humans, were
found in the burial compartments themselves as well as in the
sloping corridors. In some of the larger tombs the queen, ‘who
was undoubtedly sacrificed’ was in a separate room ‘with her
attendant slaves’, in smaller tombs ‘the sacrificed queen was
placed beside her consort’. After the entrance to the tomb proper
had been blocked, ‘the owner’s horses, camels, [148] donkeys,
and dogs, together with their grooms and possibly soldiers, were

41
P.L Shinnie, ‘Excavations at Tanqasi, 1953’, Kush 2 (1954) 66–85.
42
W.B. Emery, with L.P. Kirwan, The Royal Tombs of Ballana and
Qustul I–II (Cairo, 1938).
43
Adams, Nubia, 405.
18 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

… sacrificed in the courtyard and the ramp’.44 Among the

human victims were men, women and children. The horses were
pole-axed and then buried on the spot wearing their saddles and
harnesses, some of which were richly wrought with silver, and
some of the dogs had collars and leashes. Finally, the whole
burial site was covered by a massive tumulus, the surface of
which was, at least at Ballana, covered with white pebbles.
The number of sacrificed victims appears to have been
relatively small; the highest count in any one tomb was
seventeen.45 In recent years the interpretation of these human
sacrifices has been the subject of debate. The excavators
described them as retainer sacrifices, and so have subsequent
authors like Trigger and Adams. Lenoble, however, who
strongly advocates the continuity of Kushite funerary beliefs and
practices from Napata to Ballana, has interpreted the Ballana
and Qustul finds as well as the earlier ones in the royal tombs in
the North Cemetery at Meroe as victims of the ritual slaughter
of enemies on the occasion of a king’s funeral.46 He refers to
reliefs in Meroitic temples and royal mortuary chapels showing
rows of bound prisoners and kings and queens grasping groups
of captive enemies by the hair and raising a club or a sword in
order to kill them. However, these scenes are a direct borrowing
from ancient Egypt, where they are commonplace on temple
pylons and elsewhere. They represent the pharaoh, whose main
task it is to maintain ma‘at, the order of creation, subduing the
powers of chaos represented by Egypt’s enemies, and although a

44
Emery, Ballana and Qustul I, 25–6.
45
Trigger, JEA 55 (1969) 123; but cf. Welsby, Medieval Kingdoms of
Nubia, 43, who specifies ‘a maximum of nineteen at Qustul, nine at
Ballana and four in one of the elite burials at Firka’.
46
P. Lenoble, ‘Les “sacrifices humains” de Meroe, Qustul et Ballana.
I: Le massacre de nombreux prisonniers’, Beiträge zur
Sudanforschung 6 (1995) 59–87. In his The Kingdom of Kush, 90,
Welsby is still reluctant to accept Lenoble’s interpretation, but in The
Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia, 43, he appears to have accepted it.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 19

literal (‘historical’) interpretation has been suggested recently

for these Egyptian scenes as well,47 they are almost certainly
purely symbolic.
[149] Lenoble’s interpretation is part of a long-standing debate
about continuity and change in the various stages of Nubian
culture, from the early Kerma civilization to the Ballana culture
of Byzantine times, and particularly on the position of the latter
vis-à-vis its predecessors.48 It would take us beyond the scope of
this paper to discuss this problem here in detail. Nevertheless,
the differences between the Ballana tumuli and the Meroitic
royal tombs seem greater to me than the similarities. For
starters, the latter all take the shape of pyramids; even at the
very end of the Meroitic period, when retainer sacrifice is
revived and Nubian customs begin to regain the upper hand over
the Egyptianizing trends of the previous centuries, the tombs are
still covered by (badly constructed) pyramids. By contrast, as
Adams pointed out, ‘the domed earth tumulus, which is the
standard superstructure for all burials of the Ballana period, is
much more nearly comparable to the tumulus of Kerma times
than to anything which was built in the intervening 2,000 years’
and even the custom of covering the earth mound with white
pebbles was widespread in Kerma times.49
Another important point is the custom of bed burials. This
is an ‘un-Egyptian form of burial’ which had been practised
from Kerma to the early kings of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty until

47
A.R. Schulman, Ceremonial Execution and Public Rewards. Some
Historical Scenes on New Kingdom Private Stelae (Freiburg and
Göttingen, 1988). See the final paragraphs of H. te Velde’s
contribution to the present volume.
48
See in particular Trigger, ‘The Royal Tombs at Qustul and Ballâna
and their Meroïtic Antecedents’, JEA 55 (1969) 117–28; Adams,
Nubia, 407ff.; L. Török, Late Antique Nubia (Budapest, 1988) 216ff.;
Welsby, Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia, 23ff.
49
Adams, Nubia, 408–9. Cf. the recently introduced term ‘post-
pyramidal Meroitic’ for the 4th–6th centuries.
20 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

it was abandoned first for royal burials at the time of Taharqa,

and then by lesser members of the elite.50 It then reappeared in
post-Meroitic graves at Meroe and also at Ballana and Qustul.
Furthermore, the royal North Cemetery of Meroe was, as we
have seen, exclusively royal, whereas the elite and even the
queens were buried in the West Cemetery. At Ballana and
Qustul, the royal tumuli and smaller graves are in the same
cemetery, as had been the case at Kerma.51
In fact, the only indisputable evidence for an ideological
link between the kings of Ballana and their Meroitic
predecessors are the silver crowns in Meroitic, that is
Egyptianizing, style found in [150] several of the Ballana royal
tombs.52 While these are obviously potent symbols of kingship,
they have in fact little to do with funerary customs per se, and in
this respect their significance has probably been overrated. It
seems more likely to me, therefore, that Adams is right when he
says that ‘many aspects of the post-Meroitic burial complex
seem to represent a deliberate break with tradition, and a revival
of much older, pre-pharaonic practices’.53
Apart from these general considerations there is also the
actual location of the bodies of the sacrificed victims in the
Ballana tombs to take into account. Some of them were found in
the underground complex, some even within the royal burial
chamber itself. Thus in one case, the king’s body ‘was placed on
a canopied wooden bier below which were placed bronze and
silver vessels for his immediate use. He was dressed in his royal
regalia, and weapons for his protection were left leaning against
the foot of the bier, and at its head lay the sacrificed bodies of a
50
D.M. Dixon, ‘The Origin of the Kingdom of Kush (Napata–
Meroë)’, JEA 50 (1964) 121–32, esp. 129–30.
51
Adams, 204–6; 411.
52
Emery, Ballana and Qustul I, 22–3; cf. Trigger, ‘The Social
Significance of the Diadems in the Royal Tombs at Ballana’, JNES 28
(1969) 255–61; L. Török, The Royal Crowns of Kush (Oxford, 1987).
53
Adams, Nubia, 409–411.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 21

male slave and an ox.’54 Clearly, this sacrificed man was there
to serve the king in the afterlife; that this should be the body of
an enemy prisoner slaughtered in the course of a triumphal
celebration seems wholly unbelievable to me. Lenoble has
interpreted the presence of the ox along the same lines, viz. as
part of ‘un rite de confirmation du charisme de la famille
royale’, whose main function was ‘de célébrer et d’adapter
l’idéologie royale lors des successions’.55 Even if one accepts
this, however,56 this does not necessarily exclude the possibility
that an ox placed in the king’s burial chamber was supposed to
be of use to him in the afterlife, as were the human victims
buried with the king. The same holds true for the men buried
with the king’s saddled horses, which were clearly not just there
for triumphal ostentation,57 but ready to be used and therefore
needing the continued attention of grooms. Batrawi, in his report
on the skeletal material found at Ballana and Qustul, observed
that ‘it is a most significant fact that the animals [151] buried
inside the tombs were invariably edible, while all the animals
found in the ramp and pit are usually used for carrying, riding or
hunting’. 58

Retainer sacrifice is a custom which can be found in many

societies, in a variety of times and places, and in many forms.59

54
Emery, Ballana and Qustul I, 25–6; Adams, Nubia, 407.
55
Lenoble, ‘Le sacrifice funéraire de bovinés de Méroé à Qustul et
Ballana’, in Hommages à Jean Leclant II (Cairo, 1994), 269–83.
56
Lenoble’s iconographic evidence comes from Meroitic pyramid
chapels, but the scenes in question have again been borrowed from
common Egyptian examples.
57
Lenoble, ‘Une Monture pour mon Royaume: Sacrifices triomphaux
de chevaux et de méhara d’el Kurru à Ballana’, Archéologie du Nil
Moyen 6 (1994) 107–30.
58
A.M. el Batrawi, Mission archéologique de Nubie 1929–1934.
Report on the Human Remains (Cairo, 1935) 139.
59
Cf. the brief survey given by Trigger, JNES 28 (1969) 256–7.
22 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

There are, however, also some common features. The custom

occurs only in developed root-crop cultures,60 not in more
primitive societies, and only in societies with centralized power
in the person of a king or chief who has control over the lives of
his retainers, and who is seen as having a special relationship
with the supernatural, not in more equalitarian societies.61 It is
also more frequent in territorial states than in city-states. Finally,
there appears to be a correlation between retainer sacrifice and
other forms of human sacrifice: it occurs only in societies where
human beings were regularly sacrificed to the gods, and when
cultic human sacrifice is no longer practised, retainer sacrifice
also dies out.62 All of these factors are at work in Early Dynastic
Egypt, a developed agricultural society governed by a powerful
divine king who had recently established a centralized territorial
state after the ‘incipient city-states’63 of Late Predynastic times.
After the First Dynasty, the practice of retainer sacrifice appears
to have died out quickly, and it is probably no coincidence that
the only pictorial evidence we have of cultic human sacrifice
dates from the same period. A scene found on a few Early
Dynastic wooden labels64 shows a kneeling figure, apparently
with his hands tied behind his back, being stabbed in the chest
by an officiant holding a bowl to catch the blood. On the best
preserved label the context is clearly a royal religious ceremony,
but the status of the person killed (a willing victim? a prisoner of
war?) is unknown. That this is a real event and not just a

60
A.E. Jensen, Mythos und Kult bei Naturvölkern (Wiesbaden, 1960)
185–217; cf. A. de Waal Malefijt, Religion and Culture (New York
and London, 1968) 212.
61
Trigger, JNES 28, 257.
62
Trigger, Early Civilizations (Cairo, 1993) 97–8.
63
B.J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (London and
New York, 1989) 52.
64
Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt, 266–7 with fig. 8.2.; B. Menu,
‘Mise à mort cérémonielle et prélèvements royaux sous la Ire dynastie
(Narmer–Den)’, Archéo-Nil 11 (2001) 165–77.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 23

symbolic representation of the kind that is [152] so often

depicted in later temple reliefs is made likely by the fact that it
is not the king who is shown killing the victim, but a nonroyal
officiant. This scene is never depicted again after the First
Dynasty and cultic human sacrifice appears to have become a
highly exceptional event in later times.
There is, then, no indisputable evidence of retainer sacrifice
in Ancient Egypt after the First Dynasty. But, as Trigger rightly
remarks, ‘the ethical and socio-economic factors that have
resulted in the abandonment of this custom in the course of
social evolution are no less worthy of investigation than is the
custom itself’65 – so why was the practice of retainer sacrifice
discontinued after the First Dynasty? This is an intriguing
problem for which there is no easy solution. It is usually
assumed that in Nubia the practice of retainer sacrifice was
initially abandoned after the Kerma period because of the
political and cultural colonization of the area by the Egyptians,
who had not practised retainer sacrifice for well over a
millennium. The revival of the custom after the end of the
Egyptian domination and its aftermath under the Egyptianizing
Kushite rulers tends to confirm this. The final abandonment of
the practice appears to have been the result of the introduction
of Christianity in Nubia,66although as late as the 11th century AD
the Arabic writer ‘Abd-el-‘Aziz El-Bekri still describes a royal
burial in a tumulus grave with sacrificed retainers which is
strikingly similar to those found at Ballana and Qustul.67 For

65
JNES 28, 257.
66
On Christian burial practices in Nubia see Welsby, The Medieval
Kingdoms of Nubia, 48ff.
67
The passage, as translated by W. Vycichl, ‘The Burial of the
Sudanese Kings in the Middle Ages. A survival of the Kerma
Civilization’, Kush 7 (1959) 221–2, is worth quoting in full: ‘When a
king of the Sudan dies, they make him a big cupola from the wood of
the plane-tree and put it on his burial place. Then they bring a bed
with a few covers and cloths and introduce it (or him) into the cupola.
24 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

Early Dynastic Egypt, however, no such external influence can

be found, unless one wants to assume, as some scholars have
suggested, that the custom was rooted in a distinct Upper
Egyptian culture and that it was abandoned under the civilizing
influence of the north.68
[153] One of the main obstacles to our understanding of the
process which led to the discontinuation of the practice in Early
Dynastic Egypt is that we know very little about the status in life
of the sacrificed victims. That they were supposed to serve the
king in the hereafter seems reasonably certain, but had they also
been his servants when he was still alive, in other words, were
the king’s own servants sacrificed? This is usually assumed, and
is perhaps the most likely option, but it is also possible that the
victims were selected from among the chief families of the
elite69 or contributed by them from among their servants. This
would make it a collective form of sacrifice, a symbol of group
unity emphasizing the social bonds of the participants, their
shared belief that by sacrificing some of their servants they
contributed to the king’s continued existence in the hereafter
and thereby to the prosperity of the state, and their loyalty to the
king’s successor.
Apart from these ideological components, however, such a
practice, like all forms of conspicuous consumption or indeed

They put beside him his jewellery, his arms, his eating and drinking
vessels and they bring food and beverages with him as well as some of
the men who served him with his food and drink. Then they shut the
door of the cupola and put over the cupola mats and objects. Then the
people gather and heap earth on it until it becomes like a huge hill.
Then they make a moat around it so that one can arrive at this hill only
from one side. And they slaughter animals to their dead’.
68
Emery, Archaic Egypt, 90.
69
This appears to have been the case in 14th century Sudan, according
to the report of Ibn Batûtah quoted by E.A. Wallis Budge, Osiris and
the Egyptian Resurrection (London, 1911) 225.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 25

like any sacrifice, also involves an important economic factor.70

For although, as John Baines put it somewhat apodictically, ‘life
was cheap in most pre-modern societies and this was a striking
example of that cheapness’,71 such a statement does not take
into account the economic value servants may have represented
for their owners. ‘Even at the heart of primitive religious
ideology in such a basically important phenomenon as sacrifice,
notions of rationality and prudent calculation enter’,72 and the
sacrifice of a servant does not only despatch an easily
replaceable human body to the other world but also deprives the
surviving community of his professional skills and experience.
The retainer burials excavated by Emery at Saqqara demonstrate
that these people were not mere menial labourers but specialized
servants, such as craftsmen, painters, potters, sailors etc., who
were buried with the particular tools of their trade. The precious
items of lapis lazuli and ivory recently found in the subsidiary
graves at [154] Aha’s funerary enclosure at Abydos73 point in
the same direction. With the establishment of a centralized state
and the growing demand for luxury goods and services the elite
may well have started to think about more economical ways to
meet their ritual obligations to the deceased king and to ‘serve
God without losing touch with Mammon’.74 These
considerations are equally pertinent if, as seems likely, the
sacrificed retainers were the deceased king’s own servants, for
their deaths would then deprive his successor’s royal workshops
of their expertise. Such economic considerations may have been
strengthened by a development during the later First Dynasty,
when retainer sacrifice no longer appears to have been an
70
R. Firth, ‘Offering and Sacrifice: Problems of Organization’, JRAI
93 (1963) 12–24.
71
J. Baines, in D. O’Connor and D.P. Silverman (ed.), Ancient
Egyptian Kingship (Leiden etc., 1995) 137.
72
Firth, JRAI 93, 22.
73
See p. 139 above.
74
Firth, 23.
26 JACOBUS VAN DIJK

exclusively royal prerogative.

John Baines has drawn attention to a potential conflict
between the idea that ‘the prosperity of the land depended on the
deceased king’s destiny’ (which was presumably enhanced by
the sacrifice of his retainers) and the position of his successor as
guarantor of the country’s well-being.75 This may be so, but
such a conflict would not have been resolved by abandoning the
custom of retainer sacrifice – a similar conflict may conceivably
have existed in later times, when an incredible amount of luxury
goods for the king’s life in the hereafter was amassed in his
tomb, but no human beings were included. Moreover, this would
only work if one assumes that the absence of buried retainers in
his tomb made the deceased king ‘powerless’, and this can
hardly have been the intention in view of the later substitution of
sacrificed retainers by depictions of servants and their activities
in tomb and mortuary temple reliefs. A conflict there was, but it
was between the perceived interests of the deceased king and the
earthly economic interests of his survivors. In the end the latter
outweighed the former. I would suggest, then, that socio-
economical rather than ideological factors were responsible for
the gradual decline of the number of sacrificed retainers after the
reign of Djer, and the eventual discontinuation of the custom
after the First Dynasty. Ideological justification of this
abandonment in terms of the inviolability of human life
probably followed later. In the age of the great pyramid builders
the conspicuous consumption of human life was replaced by
other potent symbols of royal [155] status and authority,
although according to the folktale in the Westcar Papyrus
quoted at the beginning of this article, King Cheops still had to
be reminded by one of his subjects that the life of the ‘noble
cattle’76 was not cheap.77

75
Baines, in Ancient Egyptian Kingship, 136.
76
It is important to note that this term does not refer to human beings
in general, but to the Egyptians, the king’s subjects. Cf. J.M.A.
 RETAINER SACRIFICE IN EGYPT AND NUBIA 27

Janssen, ‘De farao als goede herder’, in Mens en dier [Fs. F.L.R.
Sassen] (Antwerpen and Amsterdam, 1954) 71–79; D. Müller, ‘Der
gute Hirte. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte ägyptischer Bildrede’, ZÄS 86
(1961) 126–44. The implications of this observation for the
interpretation of human sacrifice in Ancient Egypt cannot be
discussed here.
77
For help with bibliographical queries I would like to thank my
colleagues Jitse Dijkstra (Groningen), Wolfram Grajetzki (London),
and Louis Zonhoven (Leiden).