Mystery of the Screaming Mummy (Kathryn Knight, Mail Online - 10th November 2008)

On a scorching hot day at the end of June 1886, Gaston Maspero, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, was unwrapping the mummies of the 40 kings and queens found a few years earlier in an astonishing hidden cache near the Valley of the Kings.

The 1881 discovery of the tombs, in the Deir El Bahri valley, 300 miles south of Cairo, had been astonishing and plentiful. Hidden from the world for centuries were some of the great Egyptian pharaohs - Rameses the Great, Seti I and Tuthmosis III. Yet this body, buried alongside them, was different, entombed inside a plain, undecorated coffin that offered no clues to the deceased's identity.
It was an unexpected puzzle and, once the coffin was opened, Maspero found himself even more shocked.

There, wrapped in a sheep or goatskin - a ritually unclean object for ancient Egyptians - lay the body of a young man, his face locked in an eternal blood-curdling scream. It was a spine-tingling sight, and one that posed even more troubling questions: here was a mummy, carefully preserved, yet caught in the moment of death in apparently excrutiating pain.

He had been buried in exalted company, yet been left without an inscription, ensuring he would be consigned to eternal damnation, as the ancient Egyptians believed identity was the key to entering the afterlife. Moreover, his hands and feet had been so tightly bound that marks still remained on the bones.
Who could he be, this screaming man, assigned the anonymous label 'Man E' in the absence of a proper name?

Some believed 'Man E' was the traitor son of Rameses III, who'd been involved in a coup to remove him from the throne, others that he was an Egyptian governor who had died abroad and been returned to his homeland for burial. Some believed the unconventional manner of his mummification showed that he was not Egyptian at all, but a member of a rival Hittite dynasty, who had died on Egyptian soil.

As Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, puts it, 'We'd never seen a mummy like this, suffering. It's not normal, and it tells us something happened, but we did not know exactly what.'
Until now. Today, nearly 130 years after his body was first uncovered, a team of scientists has brought the wonders of modern forensic techniques to bear on the enigma.

Using sophisticated-technology, including CT scanning, Xrays and facial reconstruction, to examine the mummy, they uncovered tantalising new clues that could reveal his identity, all under the watchful eye of Five's TV crew, who are making a series of documentaries hoping to unravel some of Egypt's great secrets.

Their findings suggest that Man E is indeed Prince Pentewere, elder son of Rameses III, who, with his mother, Tiy, had evolved a plan to assassinate the pharaoh and ascend to the throne. Certainly, the theory has a number of supporters. Among them is Dr Susan Redford, an Egyptologist from Pennsylvania State University, who points out that an ancient papyrus scroll details a plot by Tiy to dethrone Rameses III in favour of their son, even though he was not the nominated heir.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1083945/Mystery-screaming-mummy.html