Screaming Woman Mummy May Reveal an Agonising Ancient Egyptian Death

The frozen, gaping expression on the face of an ancient Egyptian mummy may have resulted from an agonising death, with her features perhaps becoming fixed in a scream.

Her identity is lost to history, but her haunting expression has earned her the name Screaming Woman mummy. Although the sight naturally evokes distress, earlier researchers had suggested the appearance was caused by an inadequately carried out mummification. A new study indicates otherwise.

Radiologist Sahar Saleem of Cairo University and anthropologist Samia El-Merghani from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities have carried out a fresh investigation of the ancient remains. Their finding is that her burial was highly elaborate - far too elaborate to suggest careless work by embalmers.

"She was embalmed with costly, imported embalming material," Saleem explains. "This, and the mummy's well-preserved appearance, contradicts the traditional belief that a failure to remove her inner organs implied poor mummification."

The burial of the Screaming Woman mummy

More than 3,000 years ago, the Screaming Woman was placed in the tomb of Semnut, an 18th Dynasty royal architect who served Queen Hatshepsut. Semnut was intended to receive a richly furnished burial, and his tomb contained a separate chamber for his mother and several unnamed relatives, uncovered in 1935.

The woman was among these unidentified relatives. While her name was not recorded, she was buried with considerable ceremony: in a wooden coffin, wearing two silver-and-gold rings set with carved jasper scarabs, and with a braided wig placed on her head.

Seeking to learn more about the woman and the circumstances of her death, Saleem and El-Merghani conducted the most comprehensive assessment of her remains yet performed. They used CT scanning to create detailed three-dimensional images of her body and carry out a virtual autopsy.

Samples were also examined using several high-resolution methods, including scanning electron microscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction analysis. These techniques were used to identify the compounds and unguents applied during embalming.

Clues from the body and embalming materials

Analysis showed that the woman had been slight in stature, measuring only 1.54 metres tall. She died at approximately 48 years of age and had arthritis. Several of her teeth were missing, which is unsurprising; healing visible in her jawbone indicates that the teeth were probably lost during her lifetime.

The cause of her death could not be identified. Yet the researchers discovered something unexpected: her brain, diaphragm, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys and intestines had all been left intact. Although this was not completely unprecedented, it was unusual. In most periods - including the era in which the Screaming Woman lived - mummification commonly involved removing most internal organs.

Other details of her burial also departed slightly from convention. Her hands rested over her pelvis, instead of being arranged with the left hand across the chest and the right at her side, as was customary for royal women.

The substances used to embalm her were similarly notable. Her body had been treated with juniper and frankincense, materials that would have been imported from Africa and Arabia respectively.

Beneath the wig, which was made from date-palm fibres, her own hair had been coloured using juniper and henna. The wig had itself been treated with crystals of quartz, magnetite and albite. These would have strengthened the plaited fibres and darkened them to black, imitating natural hair.

Taken as a whole, this evidence indicates that substantial attention was given to her burial. As a result, Saleem and El-Merghani conclude that the idea that the Screaming Woman's mouth simply opened in the tomb because embalmers neglected to fasten it shut is unconvincing.

Could a cadaveric spasm explain her expression?

What, then, might have happened? In rare instances, a dying person's muscles may seize and become locked in position, remaining so into rigor mortis. Known as cadaveric spasm, this condition is thought to be more powerful than rigor mortis and difficult to reverse. It has generally been reported in cases in which someone died while experiencing an unusually intense state of distress.

The phenomenon remains highly disputed, and many scientists contest whether it exists at all. Others maintain that it can occur, but only under exceptionally rare conditions. Nevertheless, this controversial explanation could account for the Screaming Woman's expression.

"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," the researchers write in their paper.

"Embalmers likely mummified the contracted body of the woman … before it decomposed or relaxed, thus preserving her opened mouth position at death. It is also possible that the contracted muscles must have prevented embalmers from closing the mouth."

The woman's true fate and the manner of her death will probably remain unknown. Even so, research into her remains and those of similar mummies offers an unusual view of humanity's past and of the customs that accompanied people from lives lived thousands of years ago.

The paper has been published in Frontiers in Medicine.