3100 BCE: (Retainer Burial as a Nilo-Saharan Ritual Practice Adopted by the First Dynasty — Royal Tombs at Abydos Containing Not Just the Graves of Rulers bu…

3100 BCE: (Retainer Burial as a Nilo-Saharan Ritual Practice Adopted by the First Dynasty — Royal Tombs at Abydos Containing Not Just the Graves of Rulers but Large Numbers of Adjacent Graves of Retainers Buried to Accompany the King in the Afterlife, 36 with Hor-Aha and as Many as 318 with His Successor Djer, This Same Practice Present Equally Early Farther South and Persisting in the Second Millennium BCE Kerma Kingdom and in Later Nilo-Saharan-Speaking or Nilo-Saharan-Influenced States from Pre-Christian Nubia to the Wagadu Empire of the Ninth Century CE): A particularly notable ritual practice with its origins farther south figured strongly in the early royal observances of the Old Kingdom. During the First Dynasty of Old Kingdom Egypt, the royal tombs at Abydos contained not just the graves of the rulers themselves but also a large number of adjacent graves of retainers and high-status individuals, buried to accompany the king and look after him in the afterlife — 36 such burials in the case of Hor-Aha and as many as 318 people in the case of his successor, Djer; 154 with the next ruler, Djet; and even 135 subsidiary graves accompanying the burial of Den, the fifth ruler. It is striking that this ritual accompaniment of the deaths of kings similarly took place equally early farther south, and that it was a ritual feature present still in the second millennium BCE, during the high age of the Kerma kingdom of the Upper Nubian Nile region. And more than that — this ritual practice is one that historians have encountered in the histories of a number of later Nilo-Saharan-speaking, or Nilo-Saharan-influenced, states in the Sudan belt of Africa, from pre-Christian Nubia in the first half of the first millennium CE to as far west and as late in time as the Wagadu Empire of the Ghana in the ninth century CE. Egypt, viewed in the context of these wider historical developments, is best understood not as the source of this ritual practice but as an offshoot of the Middle Nile Culture Area in which this custom took strong hold for a time, although eventually dropping out of use. The practice of retainer burial — the most extreme expression of sacral kingship, the belief that the king’s power and divinity require the attendance of his court even in death — was not an Egyptian invention. It was a Nilo-Saharan institution, practiced across a vast swathe of Africa from Nubia to the western Sudan, and the Egyptian First Dynasty adopted it from the same cultural matrix that had given it ceramics, maceheads, burial practices, loanwords, and the very concept of sacral kingship itself.