True face of Egyptian mummy who died screaming in agony lastly revealed

The true face of an ancient Egyptian mummy who died screaming in agony can be seen for the first time in 3,500 years, after scientists rebuilt her likeness.

Known as the Screaming Woman, the mummy was found in 1935 in Deir Elbahari, Egypt, in the family tomb of the royal architect, Senmut.

Unusually for a mummy, her organs were left inside her, so it was long thought that her mouth was left agape by careless embalmers.
But after a recent study revealing that an agonising death was to blame for her contorted expression, scientists decided to rebuild her living face.

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Cicero Moraes, the Brazilian graphics expert behind the reconstruction, said the end result was a “pleasant face” made by combining several approaches.

He said: “I used a technique that combines elements from traditional schools of facial reconstruction with new approaches based on CT scan data from living people.

“These projections allow us to discover the spatial limits of structures such as the ear, eyes, nose, mouth, and the like.

“In addition, some structures are also traced in profile, such as the nose and lateral face. The data is complemented by the anatomical deformation technique, where the head of a virtual digital donor is adjusted to the skull to be approximated.

“Generally, there is a compatibility between all the data, with small differences, so the final face is an interpolation of all the information.”

Mr Moraes created various versions of the face. One is objective, with eyes closed, and in greyscale to avoid making
judgements about skin tone or eye colour.

Another is more subjective, showing the woman as she might have appeared in life, in colour, wearing the wig she was buried in.
And a third captures her scream, revealing how she might have looked when she was first interred.

Mr Moraes knows that his choice of skin tone may prove controversial in the latter depictions.

He said: “The issue of the skin colour of ancient Egyptian people is a source of much controversy, with the discussion shifting from the scientific to the cultural and political.

“To avoid these problems, I have sought an approach based on publications on the subject, data collected from studies of local groups, and ancient Egyptian art.”

Sahar Saleem of Cairo University, lead author of the recent study into the Screaming Woman, blamed a cadaveric spasm for the mummy’s pained expression.

“She was embalmed with costly, imported embalming material,” said Dr Saleem. “This, and the mummy’s well-preserved appearance, contradicts the traditional belief that a failure to remove her inner organs implied poor mummification.”

She continued: “The mummy’s screaming facial expression in this study could be read as a cadaveric spasm, implying that the woman died screaming from agony or pain.

“This mummified Screaming Woman is a true ‘time capsule’ of the way that she died, revealing some of the secrets of mummifications.”

The cause of her painful death, however, is lost to history. Using fourier transform infrared spectroscopy on the remains, Dr Saleem and her colleagues revealed that the body was embalmed with juniper and frankincense.

These were costly, with the former imported from the Eastern Mediterranean, and the latter from East Africa or Southern Arabia.

The mummy also wore a wig made of fibres from the date palm, which were treated with quartz, magnetite, and albite crystals.

This was probably to stiffen the locks and turn them black, a colour thought to represent youth by ancient Egyptians, Dr Saleem said.

She added: “The excavation notes mentioned she was wearing two rings with jasper scarabs set on gold and silver respectively.

“The material used for these amulets and jewellery denote the person’s wealth and socio-economic status.”

The woman’s coffin did not identify her by name, but her burial place near the mortuary temple of the great female pharaoh Hatshepsut offers a clue.

She was interred alongside the parents of Senmut, overseer of royal works and the temple’s architect, who’s reputed to have been the pharaoh’s lover.

“She was likely a close family member of Senmut to share his parents’ eternal resting place,” said Dr Saleem.

Mr Moraes praised Dr Saleem and her co-author, Samia El-Merghani of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, for their “inspiring” work.

He said: “I really enjoy two things, reading scientific papers and writing them.

“I had the opportunity to read the paper published by Saleem & El-Merghani, who provided the detailed data of the discovery, under a Creative Commons license.

“I decided to do my part by putting a face to the discovery.”

Mr Moraes published his study in the journal OrtogOnLineMag.

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