ABSTRACT
All the royal mastabas at Saqqara and the funerary palaces at Abydos are surrounded by the subsidiary burials of servants and lesser figures in the court. No one can speculate with any hope of certainty about the attitude of those Egyptians who were obliged to go down into the grave with the great men or women whom they served. With rare exceptions, such as that cited in the previous chapter, little trace has been found of resistance amongst these subsidiary dead, no general signs of dreadful struggles as was evident, centuries later, in the mass graves at Kerma, far to the south (in what was, for the average Egyptian, deepest Africa), nor the chilling if faintly farcical episode of one of the women in the drama of the death pit at Ur in Sumer, who seems to have been a little late for her own funeral and who slipped in after her companions, to join the ranks of those about to die. The Egyptians were buried in orderly tombs, neatly laid out with appropriate offerings; presumably they had administered to them some sort of tranquillizing drug or swift-acting poison, to carry them out of this world into the promise of the next or, more brutally, clubbed into insensibility. The argument which most scholars advance to account for what appears to be the placid acceptance of premature death is that by this means only would they expect to achieve immortality, as part of the retinue of the eternal king, as at this time there was no belief in the general application of eternal life beyond the king and his immediate entourage. It is as good an explanation as any.
