The research combines three complementary techniques, each filling in a different layer of the story. Sediment coring provided vertical slices through the landscape, revealing the sequence of natural and human-made deposits beneath the site. Electrical resistivity tomography and direct-current resistivity soundings mapped subsurface structures horizontally, tracing buried features without breaking the surface. Finally, phytolith analysis, the study of microscopic silica bodies formed within plant tissues, allowed the researchers to reconstruct which plants grew around the city and how vegetation changed as urbanization took hold. Together, these methods produced a picture of Bubastis that no single approach could deliver: a city whose growth, layout, and even its religious geography were dictated by the shape of the land beneath it.

The most consequential discovery concerns a set of Pleistocene sand mounds known as Geziras. These are relict landforms, remnants of ancient sandy deposits that rise subtly above the surrounding floodplain and, crucially, stay dry during the Nile’s annual inundation. Garbe’s surveys identified several of these mounds across the Bubastis area, and their positions are anything but random. The Temple of Pepi I in the western part of the city stands on one. The palace and the cemetery area in the north occupy others. Residential zones in eastern Bubastis cluster on still more. Even a lost monument may now have a location: an additional mound in the southeastern part of the site can plausibly be linked to the Temple of Hermes, a structure known from ancient writings whose whereabouts had been uncertain. The new evidence supports those textual clues about where the temple once stood.

This pattern reveals a deliberate urban logic. Rather than spreading indiscriminately across the floodplain, the builders of Bubastis selected flood-safe Geziras for their most important and most permanent structures, while leaving the low-lying ground between them for uses that could tolerate, or even benefit from, seasonal flooding. The geomorphology of the Delta was not an obstacle to be overcome but a framework to be exploited. In a landscape where the Nile’s branches shifted course and flood levels fluctuated over the centuries, choosing the right piece of ground was a matter of survival, and the people of Bubastis appear to have understood that from the city’s earliest days.

The coring program also quantified just how intensively different parts of the city were used. In settlement area S1, the researchers documented anthropogenic deposits reaching a thickness of up to 9.5 meters, an extraordinary accumulation of debris, building material, and occupation layers that identifies S1 as the primary living quarter of the city. The thickest deposits date particularly to the Ptolemaic period, from about 332 to 30 BCE, and the Roman period, from about 30 BCE to 200 CE, showing that these late phases of Bubastis’s history were also among its most densely built. By contrast, the surrounding low-lying floodplain areas, especially area S2, show only sparse settlement evidence. These marginal zones were likely given over to agriculture, and they had a distinct advantage for it: a nearby Nile branch, flowing to the north and northeast of the city, regularly deposited nutrient-rich sediments across the floodplain, keeping the fields naturally fertilized.

The phytolith record adds a biological dimension to this reconstruction, tracking vegetation from the end of the last ice age through the city’s decline. During the transition from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene, long before Bubastis existed, the landscape was dominated by grasses, shrubs, and trees, a natural Delta environment shaped by river processes rather than human hands. That changed with the arrival of settlement. From the Old Kingdom onward, spanning roughly 2850 to 2180 BCE, the onset of occupation coincided with a marked increase in cereal-type phytoliths. Crucially, these cereal signatures appear in the nutrient-rich floodplain sediments, providing the earliest evidence for localized cereal cultivation at Bubastis during the Early Old Kingdom. The fields, in other words, were already feeding the city in its formative centuries.

Inside the settlement itself, the phytolith data tell a different story. Elevated proportions of cereal-type phytoliths in anthropogenic deposits across the urban area, and particularly in the main residential zone S1, point to intensive cereal processing and storage taking place within the city walls. Grain was not only grown nearby but handled, threshed, milled, and stockpiled in the residential quarters, a pattern that speaks to the scale of Bubastis’s population and the logistical sophistication required to sustain it. The city was, in a very real sense, an agricultural machine as much as a religious and administrative center, with its food economy woven directly into the fabric of its neighborhoods.

Over time, that arrangement shifted. From the Late Period, beginning around 664 BCE, through Roman times, cultivation practices increasingly moved toward the settlement periphery. As Bubastis expanded and its builders consumed more land, the natural vegetation around the city diminished, and farming was pushed outward to the edges of the urban footprint. This trajectory, from cultivation embedded within and immediately around the early settlement to agriculture relegated to the periphery of a sprawling city, mirrors patterns familiar from urban growth in other ancient and modern contexts, but here it is documented with unusual precision through a combination of sediment chemistry, landform mapping, and plant microfossils.

The broader significance of the work lies in what it says about human adaptability in unstable environments. The Holocene Nile Delta was shaped by a constant interplay of river avulsions, sedimentation, and seasonal flooding, conditions that created fertile opportunities for early civilization while simultaneously driving settlement instability and frequent relocation. Bubastis’s longevity was not an accident of geography but the product of choices: siting temples and palaces on high ground, farming the fertile lows, and adjusting land use as the city and its environment co-evolved. Different geomorphological settings were deliberately selected for specific functions and phases of occupation, a dynamic interplay between nature and human decision-making that unfolded over three thousand years.

The study also refines interpretations of Bubastis’s emergence as a center of religious and administrative power, a status reflected in its extensive temple and palace areas, including the famous Temple of Bastet with its man-made sacred canals identified in earlier geoarchaeological work. Until now, knowledge of the site’s environmental conditions rested on a handful of historical texts and preliminary studies. By delivering the first area-wide reconstruction, the new research demonstrates how strongly the development of an ancient Egyptian urban center depended on regional environmental conditions, and it showcases the value of geoarchaeological methods for reconstructing human-environment interactions across the Delta, where so many settlements rose and fell with the shifting waters of the Nile. For Bubastis, the ground beneath the city was never just a foundation. It was a partner in the city’s survival, and reading that partnership from the sediments is what finally explains how one Delta town outlasted them all.

Subject of Research: Holocene landscape evolution and long-term settlement development at the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis in the southeastern Nile Delta

Article Title: Holocene landscape evolution and settlement development in the surroundings of the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis (“Tell Basta”), southeastern Nile Delta

Article References: Garbe, P. (2026). Holocene landscape evolution and settlement development in the surroundings of the ancient Egyptian city of Bubastis (“Tell Basta”), southeastern Nile Delta. E&G Quaternary Science Journal, 75(2), 169-171. https://doi.org/10.5194/egqsj-75-169-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/egqsj-75-169-2026

Keywords: Bubastis, Tell Basta, Nile Delta, geoarchaeology, Holocene, Geziras, phytoliths, sediment coring, electrical resistivity tomography, ancient Egypt, urban development, Nile flooding

The story begins in the 1920s, when the pioneering British archaeologist Flinders Petrie excavated the funerary complexes at Abydos, a site in Upper Egypt that served as a burial ground for Egypt’s earliest pharaohs. Petrie documented subsidiary burials surrounding the royal tombs and their associated enclosures, which were probably used for funerary rituals. Each subsidiary burial consisted of a simple chamber arranged in rows of dozens of others. Some of the dead were given simple coffins, and most were accompanied by a modest set of grave goods, including ceramic vessels. Many graves also contained small objects such as copper tools, projectile points, and small ivory figurines. A few grave markers bore names and official titles, and those titles appear to refer mostly to lower- and mid-level officials as well as artisans, suggesting that the people buried there were not elite nobles but working members of the royal establishment.

The sheer scale of these burials raised immediate suspicions. Some individual burials were surrounded by hundreds of others, and Petrie found it difficult to believe that so many people could have died of natural causes at the same time, in close succession, and in circumstances that led them all to be interred around royal tombs. He suspected that the graves reflected the practice now known as retainer sacrifice, in which people close to a ruler are killed when the ruler dies. Yet when Petrie examined the skeletal remains, he found no evidence of lethal injuries, and the absence of corroborating trauma cast doubt on his own hypothesis for decades. Without physical evidence of violence, the retainer sacrifice interpretation remained an intriguing but unproven possibility, relegated largely to footnotes in the grand narrative of early Egyptian state formation.

Dr Roselyn Campbell of Purdue University, lead author of the new study and author of a forthcoming book on state-sanctioned violence and human sacrifice in Early Dynastic Egypt, set out to solve this cold case. Her interest was drawn not only to the question of how these people died but to who they were. Even though they were buried around royalty, they have mostly been relegated to the margins of the historical narrative, and little attention has been paid to how these individuals may have viewed the ruler and their own role in his or her life and death. Retainer sacrifice, as practiced in many cultures, is often rooted in beliefs that the sacrificed individuals will continue to serve the ruler in some kind of afterlife, but it can also function as a visceral display of the ruler’s power. Some retainers might have volunteered to die in the expectation of eternal life or honor, while others may have been chosen or even forced.

To reexamine the evidence, Campbell first had to track down what remained of Petrie’s excavated material. Petrie kept meticulous records of his work, but he reburied most of the human remains he uncovered, retaining only the skulls, some of which were sent to the United Kingdom. Campbell located 46 of these crania in the Duckworth Collection at the University of Cambridge and reexamined them using modern forensic and bioarchaeological methods. The results were striking. Eighteen of the 46 crania, roughly 39 percent of the sample, showed evidence of significant cranial trauma in the form of linear fractures. Petrie appears to have mistaken these fractures for naturally caused post-depositional damage, but advances in forensic science now allow researchers to recognize them as perimortem injuries, meaning they occurred at or around the time of death, when the bone still retained the moisture and elasticity of living tissue.

The technical characteristics of these injuries carry important implications. The fractures on the preserved crania are generally linear rather than depressed, a pattern that forensic anthropologists associate with blows delivered by a flat, wide implement rather than a rounded or pointed weapon. According to Campbell, such injuries would likely cause rapid unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and death. Some of the 18 traumatized skulls also displayed evidence of sharp-force trauma, including a chopping injury to one individual’s eye. The nature of the blunt force injuries poses a puzzle for reconstructing the exact method of killing. Egyptian kings are often depicted in art smiting their enemies with a mace, but these retainers were not enemies of the crown, and a mace blow would be expected to produce depressed fractures rather than the linear pattern observed. A hard fall could also produce linear cranial fractures, but a fall violent enough to fracture the skull would probably have broken other bones as well, and no such injuries were visible in Petrie’s photographs or recorded in his notes.

Considerable uncertainty remains about the fate of the other retainers whose skulls showed no trauma. Some of them could have died naturally, perhaps of disease or other causes that left no mark on bone. Alternatively, they may have been killed in ways that are not visible skeletally, such as asphyxiation or strangulation, which leave little or no trace on the skeleton. It is also possible that some were killed in ways that would be detectable only if the rest of their skeletons could be examined, since the surviving evidence is limited to skulls that were separated from the rest of their bodies more than a century ago. Campbell has noted that with unlimited resources she would like to locate the reburied bodies of these individuals and analyze them, but the surviving cranial sample, however incomplete, has already yielded transformative new information.

The study is a powerful demonstration of the scientific value of legacy collections and archival data. Museum collections assembled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often lack the contextual documentation that modern archaeologists would prefer, and the remains they contain were frequently recovered with excavation and recording methods that would be considered inadequate today. Yet as this research shows, revisiting such datasets armed with updated methods and knowledge can reveal entirely new dimensions of the past, even when the material is incomplete and imperfect. Forensic standards for distinguishing perimortem fractures from post-depositional breakage have advanced enormously since Petrie’s era, and techniques that simply did not exist in the 1920s can now extract behavioral and pathological information from bones that were examined and set aside generations ago.

Beyond its methodological significance, the research reshapes our understanding of the earliest Egyptian state. The First Dynasty funerary complexes at Abydos represent some of the earliest monumental expressions of royal power in Egypt, and the evidence that household members were deliberately killed to accompany their rulers speaks to both the ideological and coercive dimensions of early kingship. The victims were artisans and officials, people whose names and titles were occasionally recorded on grave markers, embedded within the machinery of the royal court. Whether they went to their deaths voluntarily, believing they would serve their king in eternity, or under coercion, their deaths were woven into the political theater of royal burial. The study, published on 5 October 2026 under the title New Data from Old Bones: Using Bioarchaeology and Forensics to Reassess Legacy Data from Ancient Abydos, Egypt, marks a turning point in the debate that Petrie opened a century ago, confirming that human sacrifice was practiced at the heart of one of the world’s first territorial states and reminding archaeologists that old bones, patiently reexamined, can still rewrite history.

Subject of Research: Forensic bioarchaeological reassessment of retainer sacrifice in First Dynasty royal burials at Abydos, Egypt

Article Title: Modern forensic methods reveal human sacrifice in ancient Egypt

Article References: Modern forensic methods reveal human sacrifice in ancient Egypt. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: ancient Egypt, human sacrifice, Abydos, First Dynasty, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, retainer sacrifice, cranial trauma, Flinders Petrie, legacy collections, Duckworth Collection, Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology