Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
The so-called “Screaming Woman”, a 3,500-year-old mummified corpse from Egypt, has been “virtually dissected” to reveal how she got the expression which became her name.
It was previously thought that her open mouth and presence of organs – normally removed during mummification – was the result of careless embalmers. But the new analysis, published in Frontiers in Medicine, suggests a different theory.
The mummified body was discovered in 1935 in Deir Elbahari near Luxor, the site of ancient Thebes.
Among the tombs was that of Senmut, royal architect and suspected lover of the New Kingdom era queen Hatshepsut who ruled Egypt from 1479 BCE to 1458 BCE. Beneath Senmut’s tomb was a separate burial chamber housing his mother and other unidentified relatives.
One of them stood out.
A wooden coffin held the mummified body of a woman wearing a black wig and 2 scarab rings. Mouth wide open, the woman appeared to be locked for eternity in a cry of terror. She was hence dubbed the “Screaming Woman”.
The state-of-the-art recent analysis suggests that assumptions made about the woman’s mummification were not accurate.
She was embalmed with juniper and frankincense – pricey materials from the eastern Mediterranean, East Africa or southern Arabia. Her hair had been dyed with henna and juniper. Her wig was made from date palm fibres and further treated with quartz, magnetite and albite crystals, probably to stiffen the locks.
“Here we show that she was embalmed with costly, imported embalming material,” says first author Dr Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Kasr Al Ainy Hospital of Cairo University, Egypt.
“This, and the mummy’s well-preserved appearance, contradicts the traditional belief that a failure to remove her inner organs implied poor mummification.”
Saleem used CT scans to “virtually dissect” the body to estimate her age, identify illness or disease and assess the state of her preservation.
Saleem and her co-author Dr Samia El-Merghani also used scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction to identify the materials used in the embalming process.
The Screaming Woman would have stood 154cm tall in life. They estimate that she was about 48 years old when she died and suffered mild arthritis of the spine.
Unlike other mummified bodies during the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BCE), there was no incision for removing organs. Mummified individuals in the New Kingdom had all their organs except their heart removed. The “Screaming Woman” retained all hers.
But if her haunted expression is not due to lazy embalming, what caused it?
“The mummy’s screaming facial expression in this study could be read as a cadaveric spasm, implying that the woman died screaming from agony or pain,” Saleem says.
Cadaveric spasm is a rare form of muscular stiffening, typically associated with violent deaths and extreme pain, which persists into rigor mortis.
“The Screaming Woman is a true ‘time capsule’ of the way that she died and was mummified,” says Saleem.
