Archaeologists have long found a disturbing pattern in the graves of ancient rulers: the dead were sometimes accompanied by other dead. Around royal tombs, the remains of people – who appear to have been killed specifically to follow their masters into the afterlife – lie alongside precious objects and weapons.

A new study from Egypt has brought this practice back into the news. At the ancient royal cemetery of Abydos, archaeologists re-examined the skulls of people buried around the tombs of early rulers. They found signs of serious injuries on many of the skulls, including fractures consistent with powerful blows inflicted around the time of death.

The pattern suggests that at least some of these people did not simply die naturally and happen to be buried near their rulers. They may have been deliberately killed to accompany them into the next world.

Human sacrifice was part of funerary rites of the powerful across the ancient world, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Europe and the Americas. The practice was also a feature of elite society in ancient China, where it rested on the belief that the dead continued to exist in another world and would need servants, attendants and companions.

Archaeological evidence suggests it appeared as early as the Neolithic Liangzhu civilisation (3300BC-2300BC) in the Yangtze River Delta, but it reached its most extensive and systematic form during the Shang dynasty (1600-1046BC).

The royal cemetery at Yin, the last capital of the Shang, provides some of the clearest evidence. Excavated tombs contain the remains of large numbers of people who appear to have been deliberately killed and buried alongside their masters. The victims included prisoners of war, servants and members of the ruler’s household.

In some royal burials, the scale was extraordinary. The tomb of King Wu Ding, who died in 1192BC, contains the remains of 164 human victims, while other Shang royal tombs have yielded dozens or even hundreds.

The Zhou dynasty (1046-256BC) inherited the practice, but its scale was greatly diminished. By the Spring and Autumn (770-476BC) and Warring States (475-221BC) periods, intellectual and moral attitudes were changing. The killing of people for the benefit of the dead increasingly attracted criticism, and clay and wooden figures began to serve as symbolic substitutes for living attendants.

In 384BC, the state of Qin formally abolished human sacrifice. The enormous mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang (259-210BC), the first emperor who unified China, with its famous Terracotta Army, is perhaps the most spectacular illustration of the new solution: instead of sending a real army to the afterlife, the emperor could take an army made of clay.

Later dynasties saw rare instances, mainly in royal and aristocratic circles, when people killed themselves, or were killed, to follow their masters or husbands to the grave. Even as late as the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), palace women could still be compelled to follow an emperor in death.

Emperor Yingzong of the Ming dynasty formally abolished the practice of sacrificing palace women in 1464, but isolated cases persisted into the early Qing period (1644-1911). Finally, in 1673, the Kangxi Emperor prohibited servants from dying with their masters.

Archaeological and written records reveal a dramatic reduction in the scale of human sacrifice after the Shang dynasty, even as isolated cases persisted for centuries before the practice finally disappeared.

A practice once capable of claiming hundreds of lives in a single royal burial gradually gave way to symbolic substitutes: first wood and clay figures, and eventually the paper effigies burned for the dead today.