An ancient mummy with her mouth wide open could have died ‘screaming from agony’, scientists have said.
The mummy, found in 1935, was known as ‘Screaming Woman Mummy of the store of Kasr al Ainy’ and was kept in The Cairo Egyptian Museum.
Scientists used CT scans and other tests to see if she had any pathological abnormalities and to see if they could determine her cause of death. The published their findings in Frontiers in Medicine.
They say the 48-year-old woman had lost some teeth and lived with mild arthritis in her spine. They found she was embalmed approximately 3,500 years ago with high quality ingredients.
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The dead were mummified in Ancient Egypt because they believed it preserved them after death and allowed people to enter the afterlife. Internal organs would be removed but this didn’t happen for the ‘Screaming Woman’ mummy.
“In ancient Egypt, the embalmers took care of the dead body so it would look beautiful for the afterlife. That’s why they were keen to close the mouth of the dead by tying the jaw to the head to prevent the normal postmortem jaw drop,” lead researcher in the study, Cairo University radiology professor Sahar Saleem, told the Reuters news agency.
“This opened the way to other explanations of the widely opened mouth — that the woman died screaming from agony or pain and that the muscles of the face contracted to preserve this appearance at the time of death due to cadaveric spasm”.
They’re not sure on what caused her expression but think it could have been from ‘screaming in agony’, and muscles contract and become rigid after death, which is what could have happened in this case.
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