A 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy’s wish that he would one day speak to the gods as much as he had in life was fulfilled by scientists when they engineered an approximation of his voice using CT scans of his exceptionally intact voice tract.
Employed as a high-ranking priest and scribe at a state temple in Thebes, Nesyamun performed rituals with both song and speech, so his voice was incredibly important to him.
Active during the turbulent reign of Ramses XI, who served as Egypt’s pharaoh between 1099 and 1069 BC, he died in his mid-50s, likely due to a severe allergic reaction, and suffered from afflictions including gum disease and heavily worn teeth.
As inscribed on his coffin, Nesyamun hoped that one day after his death his soul would be able to speak to the gods as much as he had in life.
In 2020, experts managed to create with a speech synthesising tool called the Vocal Tract Organ “the sound that would come out of his vocal tract if he was in his coffin and his larynx came to life again” – as explained by the study’s co-author David Howard at the time.
The clip itself is brief, capturing a single vowel sound resembling a brief groan or “eeughh” sound.
Howard, a speech scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, and his colleagues used a CT scan of Nesyamun’s vocal track – a biologically unique tube stretching between the larynx and the lips – to 3D print a copy of his throat.
From there, they hooked the artificial organ to a loudspeaker and played an electronic signal mimicking the sound of the “human larynx acoustic output”.
The technique had previously been used on living humans, but the 2020 research marked the first time the technology had been used on a deceased’s voice.
The study, however, was not without its limitations. Co-author and University of York archaeologist John Schofield revealed that Nesyamun’s supine burial position, on his back with his head, neck and spine kept straight, curbed the experiment’s scope.
“The vocal tract has only one shape here – the shape as he lies in his sarcophagus – that produced just one sound,” explained Schofield.
Another limiting factor, added Howard, was the priest’s lack of tongue muscles, which had wasted away a long time ago. In reality, the noise heard in the audio was not a “sound he would ever likely have made in practice because the bulk of his tongue isn’t there,” he said.
In the future, the researchers hope to be able to overcome this and other obstacles by modifying their software to better approximate factors including the size of the priest’s tongue and the position of his jaw.
The team’s eventual goal is to move beyond singular vowel sounds to words and perhaps even full sentences.
“When visitors encounter the past, it is usually a visual encounter,” said Schofield. “With this voice we can change that. There is nothing more personal than someone’s voice.”
Nesyamun’s body was discovered in the early 1820s during excavations of the Deir el-Bahari causeway, near the city of Luxor, Egypt. He was purchased for the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society’s museum in Leeds, England. In 1824 his coffin and mummy was the subject of one of the earliest scientific investigations of an Egyptian mummy.
Nesyamun was the only one of the museum’s mummies to remain intact following the 1941 Leeds Blitz, although his mummy cover sustained major damage.
Some scholars, however, have voiced concerns over the implications of the study. While acknowledging the work’s potential, Kara Cooney, an Egyptologist at the University of California, warned: “When you’re taking a human being and using so much inference about what they looked or sounded like, it can be done with an agenda that you might not even be aware of”.
