Researchers Managed To Listen To The ‘Voice’ Of A 3,000 Year Old Mummy

Image credit – Scientific Reports

Over the decades, we’ve uncovered ancient buried mummies. Unfortunately, due to the lack of photographs from back then, we don’t really know how they would have looked like if they were alive. However, science and technology have managed to roughly recreate their looks based on their skeletal structures.

Now it seems that not only do we know what they might look like, but what they could sound like as well. This is thanks to the work of researchers who have managed to artificially reconstruct the “voice” of a 3,000 year old Egyptian mummy. Known as Nesyamun, he is a priest who lived under pharaoh Rameses XI.

How they managed to recreate his voice was by creating a digital reconstruction of the mummy’s vocal tract and then 3D printing it out. According to Prof David Howard, head of the department of electronic engineering at Royal Holloway, University of London, “What we have done is to create the sound of Nesyamun as he is in his sarcophagus. It is not a sound from his speech as such, as he is not actually speaking.”

While perhaps not exactly the most accurate creation, it is still an interesting technique that could also be applied to future findings. One of the other researchers, Prof John Schofield of the department of archaeology at the University of York, added some further insight on its significance.

“It is just the sheer excitement and the extra dimension that this could bring to museum visits, for example, or site visits to Karnak. The idea of going to a museum and coming away having heard a voice from 3,000 years ago is the sort of thing people might well remember for a long time.”

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