The mummy of an ancient Egyptian woman may have died “screaming in pain” with her mouth wide open and what appeared to be a terrified scream, researchers say.
The unnamed mummy of a woman, discovered during an archaeological expedition in 1935 at Deir el-Bahari near Luxor, was kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and is known as the ‘Screaming Woman Mummy from the Storehouse of Kasr al Ainy’.
In an article in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, scientists said they used CT scans and other tests to investigate whether the mummy had pathological abnormalities and to assess possible causes of death.
They found that the woman, who was about 48 years old when she died, had lost several teeth and was living with mild arthritis of the spine. Her body was embalmed with high-quality ingredients about 3,500 years ago.
Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies because they believed that preserving them after death would ensure a dignified existence in the afterlife. Normally, internal organs were removed during the mummification process, but that was not done in the case of the “Screaming Woman.”
“In ancient Egypt, embalmers cared for the dead body so that it would look beautiful in the afterlife. So they wanted to close the mouth of the dead by tying the jaw to the head to prevent the normal jaw from falling open after death,” Sahar Saleem, lead researcher on the study and a radiology professor at Cairo University, told Reuters news agency.
But in the case of the “Screaming Woman” this was not the case.
“This opened the way to other explanations for the wide-open mouth: that the woman died while screaming in pain and that the muscles of her face contracted to maintain this expression at the moment of death, due to spasms of the corpse,” Saleem told Reuters. He added that the cause of her facial expression cannot be determined with certainty, due to all the unknown factors in her history.
Saleem told Reuters that spasms in corpses are a poorly understood condition in which clenched muscles become stiff immediately after death.
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