Women of Abydos

The 1st Dynasty Abydos royal tomb complexes included subsidiary burials: long, mud-brick lined trenches built around or even linked to the king's burial and subdivided into individual graves. In some cases the rows of graves were covered with one continuous roof or burial mound and so much have been sealed simultaneously.

Inside their cells the dead, contracted and wrapped in natron-coated cloth, were buried in the short wooden coffins used by all the Egypt's elite at this time. Many had their own individual grave goods and their names and titles preserved on small limestone stelae. Crude though they appear by later standards, these stelae exhibit a uniformity that suggests they were carved in the royal workshops. Djer's tomb complex, the largest, included 317 subsidiary graves, some of which were never occupied, and these have yielded 97 funerary stelae, while some are unreadable, 76 stelae bear women's determinatives indicating that they were carved to commemorate female burials.

The surviving skeletal material shows that most of these women were young, although it has not been possible to determine exactly how they died. The status of the women is uncertain. Comparison with the impressive tombs provided for queens Neithhotep and Herneith would suggest that they are not members of the immediate royal family. Nevertheless, they are women considered important enough to merit burial beside their king. This was no insignificant honour, as it offered them the chance to share aspects of the king's divine afterlife.

Archaeologists generally agreed that the women, and the few men, represent the king's personal servants, including women who may have been classed as harem wives. Other subsidiary graves included dwarves (a particular court favorite throughout the dynastic age) and favorite hunting dogs who were provided with their own funerary stelae.

The fact that the graves were simultaneously sealed suggests that they were meant for courtiers and members of the harem expected or even compelled to die with the king. They were, however, a short-lived, wasteful phenomenon that would be abandoned by the late 2nd Dynasty when the tomb complexes of kings Peribsen and Khasekhemwy were built without any form of subsidiary burial.