An ancient Egyptian female mummy with its mouth wide open and shrieking in agony may have died with a “scream of agony”, researchers say.
The mummy of an unnamed woman was discovered during the 1935 archaeological expedition of Deir el-Bahari near Luxor and is kept in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where it is named “The Mummy of the Screaming Woman from the Shops of Qasr al-Aini.” It was called.
Sahar Saleem
In an article in the medical journal Frontiers in Medicine, scientists said they examined the mummy for pathological abnormalities and performed CT scans and other tests to assess potential causes of death. .
The woman, who was approximately 48 years old at the time of her death, was missing several teeth and was found to have been living with mild spondyloarthritis. Her body was embalmed with high-quality materials about 3,500 years ago.
ancient egyptians mummified corpse This is because they believed that preserving them after death would ensure a valuable existence in the afterlife. Normally, during mummification, internal organs are removed, but this was not the case with “The Screaming Woman”.
“In ancient Egypt, embalmers took care of bodies so that they looked beautiful even in the afterlife. That’s why they closed the mouths of the dead by tying the chin to the head to prevent the normal postmortem jaw drop. Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University and lead researcher on the study, told Reuters.
However, this was not the case with “The Screaming Woman.”
“This paved the way for another explanation for the wide-open mouth. The woman died screaming in agony and pain, and the facial muscles contracted to maintain this appearance during death due to the cadaver’s spasms.” “We did so,” Saleem told Reuters. He added that the cause of her expression cannot be established with certainty because there are many unknowns in her history.
Saleem told Reuters that cadaveric spasm is a poorly understood condition in which muscles that contract shortly after death become stiff.