New scientific investigations on the famous Egyptian mummy of the screaming woman, found in the 1930s near Luxor.
According to a study published in Frontiers in Medicine by the radiologist Sahar Saleem of Cairo University and the anthropologist Samia El-Merghani, the chilling expression on his face was not due to the embalming techniques, but rather to the pain spasms that 3,500 years ago they led to her death at the age of 48.
The mummy, preserved in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was found during an archaeological expedition organized in 1935 by the Metropolitan Museum in New York at the site of Deir Elbahari, near Luxor. The wooden sarcophagus was discovered in a burial chamber beneath the tomb of Senmut, the architect and superintendent of royal works and alleged lover of Queen Hatschepsut.
He was immediately surprised by the expression on his face, as if immortalized in a scream of pain. The question raised a heated debate among archaeologists, divided between those who maintained that it was the result of approximate embalming and those who instead opted for an expression of physical pain linked to a state of agony. To resolve the question, the Egyptian researchers virtually dissected the mummy using CT and tried to trace the materials used for embalming through other analysis techniques such as scanning electron microscopy, spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction.
(Unioneonline/D)
