The history of ancient Egypt is very intriguing. Think Egypt and the first thing that pops to your mind is ‘Mummy‘. I mean just imagine the amount of trouble people went through to preserve a corpse that lasted for thousands of years.
Well, all the hard work certainly didn’t go to waste. Recently, researchers were able to mimic the voice of a 3,000-year-old mummified Egyptian priest by recreating its vocal tract, reports ABC News. The team replicated the voice of Egyptian priest Nesyamun from the Leeds City Museum in the UK using medical scanners, 3D printing, and an electronic larynx.
The priest lived during the politically volatile reign between BC 1099-1069 and worked at the state temple where he needed a strong voice for singing and speaking. The team of researchers chose the mummified priest for the “Voices of the Past” project because his soft tissue in the throat and vocal tract were reasonably intact. According to the researchers, this technique wouldn’t have worked on just skeletal remains.
In 2016, the team had taken the mummy to the Leeds General Infirmary, where it underwent a CT scan to take the measurements to replicate its vocal tract. They then produced a 3D-printed voice box using the mummy’s duplicate tract and connected it to an artificial larynx to reproduce the sound of Nesyamun’s voice. The recreation technique allowed them to produce a single sound that fell somewhere between the vowels “bed” and “bad”, reports CNN.
Hear the mummified priest’s voice:
Researchers say they’ve mimicked the voice of an Egyptian mummy by recreating some of its vocal tract.
Have a listen…
What does it sound like to you? pic.twitter.com/nSjsCu2f0w
— News Breakfast (@BreakfastNews) January 23, 2020
“It was Nesyamun’s “express wish” to be heard in the afterlife, which was part of his religious belief system. It’s actually written on his coffin, it was what he wanted,” Joann Fletcher, a professor of archaeology at the University of York was quoted saying by BBC. “In a way, we’ve managed to make that wish come true,” he added.
However, the uncanny tone is unlikely to be an exact reflection of the mummified priest’s speech as his tongue must have lost much of its bulk over a period of a thousand years.
The research was conducted by scholars at the Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of York and Leeds Museum and in the future, they hope to use the computer models to replicate full sentences in Nesyamun’s voice. Now that’s a noteworthy achievement for mankind.