The mummy of an ancient Egyptian woman, her mouth wide open in what sounds like a scream of anguish, may have died “screaming in agony,” researchers say.
The anonymous female mummy, discovered during an archaeological expedition in 1935 at Deir el-Bahari near Luxor, was kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and called the “screaming female mummy from the Kasr al Ainy storehouse”.
Sahar Saleem
In a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, the scientists said they used CT scans and other tests to determine whether the mummy had any pathological abnormalities and to assess potential causes of death.
Researchers found that the woman, who was about 48 years old at the time of her death, had lost some teeth and suffered from mild arthritis of the spine. Her body had been embalmed about 3,500 years ago using high-quality ingredients.
The Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies because they believed that keeping them after death guaranteed them a dignified existence in the afterlife. Usually, the internal organs were removed during the mummification process, but this did not happen with the “Screaming Woman.”
“In ancient Egypt, embalmers took care of the body of the deceased so that it would be beautiful for the afterlife. That’s why they insisted on closing the mouth of the dead person by attaching the jaw to the head to prevent the normal jaw drop after death,” Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University and lead researcher on the study, told Reuters news agency.
But this did not happen in the case of the “Screaming Woman.”
“This opened the door to other explanations for the wide-open mouth – that the woman died screaming in agony or pain and that the facial muscles contracted to preserve that appearance at the time of death due to a cadaveric spasm,” Saleem told Reuters, adding that because of all the unknowns surrounding her story, the cause of her expression cannot be established with certainty.
Saleem told Reuters that cadaveric spasm is a poorly understood condition in which contracted muscles become rigid immediately after death.
