The Screaming Mummy

Among the royal caches of ancient Egypt, one body has never stopped screaming. Catalogued with the deliberately colourless name Unknown Man E, the mummy was recovered in 1881 from the great hidden tomb at Deir el-Bahari, where nervous priests of a later dynasty had gathered the endangered dead of earlier kings to protect them from robbers. The head is thrown back, the mouth wrenched open in what looks unmistakably like a cry of anguish frozen at the moment of death.

He was treated strangely for a man laid among royalty. Where his companions were carefully eviscerated and swaddled in fine linen, Unknown Man E was wrapped in the skin of a sheep, a material the Egyptians considered ritually unclean, and his body was never embalmed in the usual way. His hands and feet appear to have been bound. To the excavators this suggested a punishment carried through even into the afterlife, a deliberate defilement.

The most persistent theory holds that the man was Prince Pentawere, a son of Ramesses III implicated in the so-called Harem Conspiracy, a palace plot to assassinate the pharaoh. Trial records survive on papyrus; the conspirators were condemned, and Pentawere, found guilty, was permitted or compelled to take his own life.

The gaping mouth, however, needs no curse to explain it. Bodies not bound at the jaw commonly fall open as the tissues relax after death, and the head tips back as ligaments slacken. A more recent study proposed the pose was fixed by embalming soon after death, meaning the scream, so eloquent to the living eye, may simply be the ordinary indifference of a corpse left to gape.

Provenance: the Deir el-Bahari royal cache, Egypt; recovered 1881, now held by the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.