3000 Year Old Mummy Breaks Silence

An ancient mummy, believed to belong to a priest, recently got a CT scan at a hospital in Milan, Italy. The mummy of Ankhekhonsu, an ancient Egyptian priest, was transferred from Bergamo's Civic Archaeological Museum to Milan's Policlinico hospital, where experts will shed light on his life and the burial customs of almost 3,000 years ago. 

The procedure is a part of a project that aims to discover the mummy’s identity and the way it was preserved. A 3000-year-old mummy, believed to belong to a priest, recently got a CT scan at a hospital in Italy in a bid for the researchers to reconstruct its life, death.

Using a model of a 3,000-year-old mummy’s vocal tract, researchers have approximated the voice of a long-dead Egyptian priest. They were able to create a single burst of sound, a vowel-like bleat between the “e” in “bed” and the “a” in “bad.”

The sound of a vocal tract from the past has been synthesized to be heard again in the present, allowing people to engage with the past in completely new and innovative ways. The precise dimensions of an individual’s vocal tract produce a sound unique to them.

Statement from Director

Sabina Malgora, the director of the Mummy Project Research, reportedly said that the mummies are practically a “biological museum” and are like a “time capsule”. Malgora added that the information on the mummy’s name comes from the sarcophagus dated between 900 and 800 BC, where Ankhekhonsu - which means 'the god Khonsu is alive' - is written five times. 

The researchers believe that they can reconstruct the life and death of the Egyptian priest and understand which kinds of products were used to mummify the body.

Further, Malgora informed that studying ancient diseases and wounds is important for modern medical research. She added that the procedure can help researchers study cancer or the arteriosclerosis of the past, which can be useful for modern research.

About 3000 Year Old Mummy

The study authors said that the priest, named Nesyamun, would be pleased with this postmortem re-creation of his voice. “It is the fulfillment of his belief” to have his voice heard in the afterlife, said study author John Schofield, an archaeologist at the University of York in England.

Nesyamun worked as a scribe at the temple of Karnak in Thebes. His voice would have been critical in his priestly duties as he spoke, chanted, and sang. Nesyamun was mummified and entombed in a coffin inscribed with hieroglyphs, mainly texts from the Book of the Dead.

Since 1823, his body has been kept at Leeds City Museum, where his body was unwrapped. Scholars, surgeons, and chemists have examined him in the many years since, probing the mummy by microscope, endoscope, and X-ray. 

A “multidisciplinary scientific investigation” of Nesyamun, published in 1828, “was the first of its kind in the world,” Schofield said.  

CT Scan of Mummy

In the new work, scientists made precise measurements of Nesyamun’s well-preserved vocal tract, using a CT scanner at Leeds General Infirmary. 

From this scan, they printed a 3-D copy of his throat and hooked it up to a loudspeaker. They fed an electronic signal (a simulation of “a human larynx acoustic output,” said study author David Howard) through the faux organ to produce the voice.

The single sound represents a proof-of-concept work, said Howard, who studies human speech and singing at Royal Holloway, part of the University of London. 

“To produce other vowels would require changes to the shape of the vocal tract,” Howard said. That is their next step, with the eventual goal of producing words, singing, and even speech.

Outcomes of CT Scan

Vocal tracts are biologically unique, said Daniel Bodony, an aeroacoustics expert at the University of Illinois who was not a part of the research team.

The study’s authors captured Nesyamun from his lips back down to the trachea. But the vocal tract is only half of what makes “the human being sound like the human being,” Bodony said. The other half flutters at the base of the tract: the vocal folds, also known as cords or reeds. 

Human vocal folds vibrate at multiple frequencies, yielding “richness and emotion,” and the sound the vibration produces is further distorted by traveling through the tract. An electronic substitute for fleshy vibration is why this re-creation “sounds tinny,” Bodony said.

The study authors anticipate this re-creation, and future expansions of Nesyamun’s voice will be a hit with Leeds’s audience of museum-goers. “When visitors encounter the past, it is usually a visual encounter. With this voice we can change that,” Schofield said. “There is nothing more personal than someone’s voice.”

The dimensions of Nesyamun’s tract, smaller than a modern adult man’s, suggest he might have been a tenor. If so, the priest would have been a welcome addition to singers Howard directs. “We need them in my choir!” Howard said it meant tenors, not mummies.

Written By - Bhagyadeep Jena

Edited By - Gunika Manchanda