An Egyptian mummy’s silent ‘scream’ hints at her violent death
A rare type of muscle stiffening — a cadaveric spasm — could explain the alarming expression
An ancient Egyptian mummy known as the Screaming Woman (pictured) maintains a facial expression from the time of her death.
Sahar Saleem
Eek! A horrible death could explain the horrified look on one Egyptian mummy’s face.
Her remains were unearthed in the 1930s in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes. They’d been found in a burial chamber from roughly 3,500 years ago. The unnamed woman’s mummy seems to wear an open-mouthed look of pain or fear. That expression has earned her “the Screaming Woman” nickname.
Now, research suggests that her expression resulted from a rare muscle reaction at death. It’s called a cadaveric spasm. It’s a sudden stiffening of muscles in someone who dies a violent death under extreme physical and emotional stress.
Sahar Saleem and Samia El-Merghani shared these findings August 2 in Frontiers in Medicine.
Saleem is a radiologist. She works at Cairo University in Egypt. El-Merghani is an anthropologist, also based in Cairo. She’s a mummy conservator at Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
The Screaming Woman’s cause of death remains a mystery. So researchers cannot be sure a cadaveric spasm caused her alarming look. But new evidence does show care and cost involved in mummifying her body. This hints that the embalmers who preserved her did not simply forget to close her mouth.
CT scans showed that the woman’s internal organs had not been removed. That’s unusual in Egyptian embalming. The researchers looked at samples of the mummy’s skin, hair and wig under a microscope.
They also analyzed chemicals in those samples. This revealed that embalmers used imported juniper resin and frankincense on the mummy’s skin. Such treatment would have kept the body well-preserved. Embalmers took further care to dye the woman’s hair. For that, they used juniper resin and henna. The mummy also wore a braided wig. It was made from date palm fibers that had been dyed black. (The color black represented youth in ancient Egypt.)
This all suggests that if the embalmers who worked on this mummy could have closed her mouth, they would have. That means that her silent “scream” was likely frozen in place when she died.
