Egypt, 1935. Archaeologists excavating a tomb in the necropolis of Thebes make an unsettling discovery: the mummified remains of an elderly woman, her mouth locked open in a frightful rictus, as if screaming in horror.
In a further mystery, examination of the “Screaming Woman” revealed that she still possessed her internal organs, most of which would ordinarily have been removed during the embalming process.
If the woman had been mummified poorly, it was long reasoned, this might explain her horrific expression, with the embalmers having simply neglected to close her mouth prior to her burial some 2,500 years ago.
A fresh analysis by researchers from Cairo University, however, supports the awful alternative—the poor woman did indeed die screaming in sheer agony.
Sahar Saleem
“Here we show that she was embalmed with costly, imported embalming material,” said paper author and radiologist professor Sahar Saleem of Cairo University’s Kasr Al Ainy Hospital said in a statement.
She continued: “This, and the mummy’s well-preserved appearance, contradicts the traditional belief that a failure to remove her inner organs implied poor mummification.”
In their study, Saleem and her colleague Samia El-Merghani of Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities took CT scans to allow them to virtually dissect the Screaming Woman and study her condition and state of preservation in brand new detail.
Alongside this, the duo also studied the materials used in the embalming process using such advanced techniques as scanning electron microscopy, in which a surface is probed using a beam of elections to create a high-resolution image; and x-ray diffraction analysis, a non-destructive method that can reveal the chemical composition of a target object.
Sahar Saleem
The History of the Screaming Woman
Formally known as “CIT8”, the Screaming Woman mummy was unearthed at Deir el-Bahari, a tomb complex in the Thebian necropolis, during the Metropolitan Museum of New York’s 1935 expedition to Egypt.
Archaeologists had been excavating the tomb of Senenmut, an architect and high steward who lived during the 18th Dynasty (1550–1292 BCE), the first of the New Kingdom, the era which saw ancient Egypt reach the peak of its power.
Senenmut served—and, according to some theories, was the lover of—the pharaoh Hatshepsut, who reigned from 1479–1458 BCE.
Beneath the high steward’s tomb, the expedition came across a separate burial chamber constructed for Senenmut’s mother, Hat-Nufer, and other unidentified relatives.
Sahar Saleem
Found among these entombed, in a wooden coffin, the Screaming Woman was buried wearing a black wig, and two scarab-styled rings.
After her discovery, the woman was transferred to the Kasr Al Ainy School of Medicine in Cairo, where many royal mummies—including that of Tutankhamun the “boy king”—in the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1998, CIT8 was relocated to the Cairo Egyptian Museum at the request of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities.
The Screaming Woman’s wooden coffin and rings, meanwhile, were separated from her, and have been on display in the Metropolitan Museum of New York since 1935.
Sahar Saleem
The researchers’ analysis revealed that the mummy—which has been unwrapped, and lies with her hands covering her groin—remains preserved in a good condition.
Consistent with how the Screaming Woman’s internal organs (including brain, lungs and liver) had been left in place, the body bore no embalming incision.
(During the New Kingdom [1550–1069 BCE] when the woman lived, it was customary to remove the internal organs, which were at risk of rapid decay, and preserve them separately in so-called canopic jars or chests. Normally, only the heart was left in place, as this in ancient Egypt was believed to be the source of personality, intellect and memory.)
From their scans, the duo estimatd that the Screaming Woman would have been some five feet tall and, based on the shape of her pelvic bones, around 48 years old when she died.
Although the analysis revealed no obvious cause of death, the team were able to shine some light on the woman’s health.
For example, the detection of bone spurs on the vertebrae of the spine suggests that she suffered from mild arthritis
The woman was found to be missing several teeth—likely during her life, based on signs of bone resorption—while others were broken or showed signs of wear and tear.
“Teeth lost during life may have been extracted,” Saleem said, explaining that dentistry is a practice believed to have originated in ancient Egypt, albeit in a rudimentary form.
Sahar Saleem
Examination of the Screaming Woman’s wig revealed that it had been made using fibers from the date palm, and then treated with crystals of albite, magnetite and quartz, likely to stiffen the locks and confer the black color valued for its connotations of youth.
Chemical analysis of her skin, meanwhile, revealed that she had been embalmed using the aromatic resin frankincense and the oil of juniper berries—both of which at the time would have been expensive imports from places like East Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Southern Arabia.
Juniper was also found to have been used, alongside the reddish plant dye henna, to color her natural hair.
These findings, Saleem said, provide further evidence of how embalming materials were traded in ancient Egypt.
“The expedition led by Queen Hatshepsut brought frankincense from Punt,” she explained, referring to a former kingdom known only from ancient Egyptian trade records—possibly located in what is today Eritrea, Ethiopia or Somalia—which exported goods including aromatic resins, blackwood, ebony, ivory, and gold.
“The tomb of Tuankhamun also contained frankincense and juniper”, Saleem added.
But if—as the use of expensive, imported embalming materials hints—the mummy’s expression was not the result of a sloppy embalming, what left her frozen in a silent scream?
Saleem has a theory: “The mummy’s screaming facial expression […] could be read as a cadaveric spasm, implying that the woman died screaming from agony or pain.”
A cadaveric spasm is a rare form of post-death muscle stiffening reportedly associated with extreme physical or emotional stress.
Unlike rigor mortis, which can take hours to set in and is temporary, cadaveric spasms are said to occur instantaneously and are not easily loosened—perhaps explaining why the Screaming Woman’s embalmers were unable to close her mouth.
“The Screaming Woman is a true ‘time capsule’ of the way that she died and was mummified,” Saleem concluded.
The full findings of the study are published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.
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