Revealed the mystery of the "screaming mummy".
She may be an Egyptian princess who died of a heart attack
The "screaming mummy" belongs probably to an Egyptian princess who lived about 3.500 years ago. She was embalmed with her mouth wide open and her body twisted in pain because she suffered a fulminating heart attack. Egyptologists believe they have finally solved the mystery of the mummy discovered in 1881 in Deir el-Bahari, near Luxor, in the Valley of the Kings.
The solution of the case, reports the French newspaper "Le Figaro", was hypothesized by the famous archaeologist Zahi Hawass, former secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, and Sahar Saleem, professor of radiology at the University of Cairo, thus putting end to dozens of theories, many bizarre, born around this mysterious corpse.
The two experts scanned the mummy with sophisticated diagnostic machines like x-ray and CT scan, to discover its probable identity. Hawass believes that it is a princess named Meret Amun, daughter of the pharaoh Seqenenra Tao (king of the XVII dynasty), who ascended the throne between 1560 BC and 1558 BC. The researchers will soon use the DNA test to confirm its genealogy.
Hawass and Saleem suspect that the princess had a heart attack that killed her instantly, as demonstrated by her posture with her legs crossed and bent and her mouth open blocked by rigor mortis, which led to a stiffening of the muscles. The team of specialists found that severe atherosclerosis, a degenerative coronary artery disease, would have been the cause of the princess' sudden heart attack. Hawass explained that the careful embalming process of the ancient Egyptians involved preserving the posture of the deceased at the time of death.
For this reason the embalmers could neither straighten nor lengthen the body.
Despite this, the princess received good treatment during mummification. The embalmers removed his viscera and placed expensive materials in the cavities of his body, such as resin or fragrant spices, then wrapping the corpse in a white linen. His brain was not removed: it is still preserved, dried up, in the skull of the mummy. This was an important clue in determining which dynasty the woman could belong to and in favouring some genealogical traces over others.
The body of the Princess Meret Amun lays in the funeral complex of Deir el-Bahari next to a man's mummy. Studies conducted in 2012, also using CT scans and DNA tests, have shown that the man body was of the son of Pharaoh Ramses III, named Pentawere.
Involved in the murder of his father, he committed suicide by hanging.
