c. 3100 BCE · Africanapproximate
Three hundred and eighteen people are buried beside King Djer
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The First Dynasty royal tombs at Abydos hold more than kings. Around them lie the graves of retainers and high-status people put there to accompany the ruler and look after him afterwards. Hor-Aha has thirty-six such burials. His successor Djer has as many as three hundred and eighteen. Djet has one hundred and fifty-four, and Den, the fifth ruler, has one hundred and thirty-five. The practice was neither confined to Egypt nor started there. It appears equally early further south, it was still going in the second millennium BCE at the height of the Kerma kingdom on the Upper Nubian Nile, and it recurs across a long line of Nilo-Saharan-speaking or Nilo-Saharan-influenced states in the Sudan belt, from pre-Christian Nubia to the Wagadu empire of the Ghana in the ninth century CE. Egypt is one branch of that tradition. It kept retainer burial for a few generations and then let it go.
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