Screaming Woman Mummy may have died in excruciating agony: study

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The Screaming Woman Mummy looks just as horrific as her nickname suggests, real nightmare stuff.

Now a “virtual dissection” by a Canadian-trained radiologist and mummy expert has found that she might actually have died in excruciating agony.

In other words, her gruesome facial appearance might reflect actual torment. It might not be just a meaningless post-mortem accident. She might thus be an even scarier and compelling figure than she appears on first sight.

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“This mummified Screaming Woman is a true time capsule of the way that she died, revealing some of the secrets of mummifications,” said Sahar Saleem in an emailed statement.

Saleem is an Egyptian radiologist who has previously scanned dozens of other mummies, including the body of King Tutankhamun. She also found a knife wound in the throat of Ramesses III, suggestive of murder.

She started her career in paleoradiology while studying medicine at Western University, when she participated in the scan of a mummy on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum. She later joined Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities in 2006, and has worked on many mummies since then. She is a professor of radiology at Cairo University’s faculty of medicine, and remains a fellow at Western.

The Screaming Woman’s true name is not known, but her mummified body was found in 1935 beneath a tomb in the Theban Necropolis, across the Nile from Luxor in Egypt. It was a tomb for relatives of Senmut, a commoner who became high steward, chief architect, and reputedly the lover of Queen Hatshepsut in the first half of the 15th century BCE. The tomb had a separate burial chamber that contained Senmut’s mother and other unidentified relatives. The Screaming Woman was among them, in a wooden coffin, wearing a wig made of date palm fibres in a thick black coating, with two scarab rings in silver and gold.

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In Saleem’s new research, computed tomography was used to build up a three-dimensional image, and helped inform an estimate of her age at about 48 years.

It found that her brain and internal organs are in place, desiccated, and were not removed as usual for the time. There were also no embalming packs.

Previously, that was interpreted as a sign of poor mummification techniques, simple carelessness. But that does not fit with another discovery, that she was embalmed with imported valuable materials, not the sort of thing a careless embalmer would do.

The research was published Friday in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Medicine, in its pathology section.

It reports results of scanning electron microscopy, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction analysis, which can reveal chemical composition of materials. These scans found the Screaming Woman’s teeth were worn down, her joints degenerated, and she had mild spinal arthritis. There was no obvious cause of death.

One surprising discovery was that the skin, hair and wig were all treated with a juniper resin that prevented deterioration by bacteria and insects. The hair also contained the natural dye henna, and the wig and skin had been treated with frankincense.

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That stood out because the frankincense and juniper would have had to come from far away, perhaps from what is now Somalia or Yemen.

“Here we show that she was embalmed with costly, imported embalming material. This, and the mummy’s well-preserved appearance, contradicts the traditional belief that a failure to remove her inner organs implied poor mummification,” said Saleem.

So, if she was embalmed with care, why is her mouth so wide open? Why wouldn’t the embalmers close it?

One theory, unproven but interesting as a hypothetical, is that this facial expression is a result of “cadaveric spasm,” a hypothesis about muscles seizing up when they are used intensely at the moment of death, such as a hand gripping a weapon.

The idea, unproven and not universally accepted in pathology, is that “cadaveric spasm” is a sort of instant muscular stiffening that is similar to rigor mortis except that it occurs before death, and persists through rigor mortis.

“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 said.

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In previous similar work, Saleem also scanned the last unwrapped pharaonic mummy, Amenhotep I, and found a girdle of 34 golden beads at his lower back; amulets of scarabs, snails, serpent heads and the Eye of Horus in gold, clay and stone; and evidence that his earthly remains were damaged and fixed up by ancient Egyptian priests four centuries after his death in 1504 BCE.

That research also offered the first post mortem glimpse of his face, revealing a slightly bucktoothed 35-year-old man with a narrow chin, sunken cheeks, small eyes and a pierced left ear — less immediately striking, in other words, than the nameless Screaming Woman.

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