The earliest direct evidence for an entourage of women ‘belonging’ to the monarch is provided by the subsidiary burials which are associated with the royal tombs of the Archaic Period 1st Dynasty at Abydos. These graves were allocated to men and women who had been closely attached to the king in a personal and subservient capacity, rather than to high-ranking court officials and ministers. They therefore include servants and minor mortuary priests, together with dwarfs, favourite dogs and, of course, favourite women.2 The number of subsidiary burials accompanying each monarch varied but was invariably large; for example, the burial-complex of King Djer included the graves of over three hundred associated retainers. Ninety-seven private stelae have survived from Djer’s secondary burials, and it is striking that seventy-six (78 per cent) of these graves were occupied by women. Many of these ladies had been interred with high-quality grave-goods suggesting that they had been people of some importance in court circles; it is by no means a foregone conclusion that they were all royal concubines.
Unfortunately, most of the subsidiary burials have been badly plundered and their human remains dispersed, so that in many cases it is now only the names and rather vague titles carved on the surviving gravestones which give an indication of the sex of the interred. We therefore have no scientific evidence to suggest how the occupants of these graves met their end. It may be that as the king made detailed preparations for his own death he also made provision for his loyal retainers, allocating plots of land for their subsidiary graves and thereby ensuring that, at the end of their natural lives, they could be interred in the shadow of their master’s far more impressive tomb. Alternatively, it must be considered at least possible that the graves were dug for servants who were either killed or forced to commit suicide following the death of their master. Professor Emery, the excavator of the subsidiary graves around the Sakkara burial associated with Queen Meryt-Neith, had the opportunity of observing the position of some of the human remains as the graves were opened, and he remarked that:
No trace of violence was noted on the anatomical remains, and the position of the skeletons in no case suggested any movement after burial. It would therefore appear probable that when these people were buried they were already dead and there is no evidence of their having been buried alive. The absence of any marks of violence suggests that they were killed by poison prior to burial.3
The harsh tradition of automatically sacrificing loyal retainers and even wives following the natural death of their master or husband is one which is occasionally found in strongly feudal and patriarchal societies both ancient and modern. Indeed, the now illegal Indian custom of suttee, which requires a widow to throw herself on to her husband’s blazing funeral pyre, is still surreptitiously practised in remote parts of rural India today. The most relevant contemporary parallel to the archaic Egyptian burials comes from Mesopotamia. The Sumerian Royal Cemetery of Ur has been dated to approximately 2650 BC. Here, both kings and queens shared magnificent tombs with their personal attendants and a wealth of treasure, while the associated burials included a mass grave, now known as the Great Death Pit, which yielded the bodies of six men and sixty-eight elegantly dressed women. All these courtiers had apparently entered their grave willingly, taking poison to the accompaniment of music provided by the musicians whose fingers were still resting on their harp strings four thousand years later. The Sumerian Royal family, like the Egyptian, enjoyed semi-divine status and was perceived as the mortal parallel to the heavenly gods. It would appear that their servants and attendants were happy enough to exchange a certain earthly existence for the chance to continue to serve their gods in the next world.4
Although it is possible that either voluntary or involuntary human sacrifices were made during the Archaic Period, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this wasteful tradition extended into the Old Kingdom. However, the Old Kingdom monarchs did continue the custom of maintaining a relatively large group of women attached to the court, and the more important of these women, the principal wives, daughters and mothers of kings, were eventually buried in the subsidiary tombs constructed around the royal pyramids. Herodotus believed, incorrectly, that at least one Old Kingdom princess had earned the wealth to build her own pyramid:
The wickedness of King Cheops reached such a pitch that, when he had spent all his treasures and wanted more, he sent his daughter to the brothels with orders to earn a certain sum for him – how much, I don’t know. She earned the money, but at the same time she asked each of her clients to give her one stone as a contribution towards building a monument which would perpetuate her own memory. With these stones she eventually built the pyramid which stands in the middle of the three which are in front of the great pyramid.