In case you haven’t heard, on 23 January 2020, a group of British researchers published a paper in the British scientific journal Scientific Reports claiming that they had reconstructed the voice of an ancient Egyptian man named Nesyamun, who worked as a priest, scribe, and incense-bearer at the temple complex at the site of Karnak in Upper Egypt during the reign of the pharaoh Ramesses XI (most likely ruled c. 1107– c. 1077 BC). Nesyamun was probably of Nubian descent. He died in around his mid-fifties and, at the time of his death, suffered from severe gum disease.
The researchers used a CT scanner, a 3D printer, a loudspeaker, and computer software to reconstruct what they claim is what it would sound like if Nesyamun were to speak the vowel sound “eh.” Unfortunately, the claim of the researchers that they have reconstructed Nesyamun’s actual voice is highly dubious.
The technology used
Nesyamun’s mummy is kept on display in the Leeds City Museum in the city of Leeds, England. A team of British researchers led by the speech scientist David Howard conducted a CT scan of Nesyamun’s mummy. They then used a 3D printer to create a model of Nesyamun’s vocal tract using the data from the CT scan. They then hooked the model up to a speaker and used a computer program to play sound through it.
The researchers only recorded the open-mid front unrounded vowel sound /ɛ/, which sounds like the ⟨e⟩ in bed. The sound has been repeatedly characterized as sounding like a sort of groan or moan.
ABOVE: Photograph from the Leeds Museum Gallery of Nesyamun’s mummy about to be put into the CT scanner
“A precise recreation”?
This alleged reconstruction of Nesyamun’s voice has been massively overhyped. The media has presented it as thought it were actually an exact recreation of Nesyamun’s voice as he would have sounded when he was alive. The Independent called it “a precise recreation of [Nesyamun’s] unique vocal sounds.” Even The New York Times ran an article with the rather sensationalist headline “The Mummy Speaks! Hear Sounds From the Voice of an Ancient Egyptian Priest.”
There are a lot of problems with these claims, though. For one thing, Nesyamun’s vocal tract has undeniably changed significantly since the time of his death. His tongue is dried out and has lost most of its original muscle mass, meaning it is now much smaller than it would have been when Nesyamun was alive. Meanwhile, Nesyamun’s soft palate was completely missing, meaning researchers simply guessed at where it would have originally been located. In addition, the researchers also note in their paper:
“The dimensions of Nesyamun’s tract are 81.4 mm between the external front of the upper lip and the hard/soft palate boundary and 68.4 mm between the thyroid notch and the hard/soft palate boundary. Comparable measurements for two living adult males are 103.6/111.0 mm and 80.0/86.0 mm respectively. Nesyamun’s tract therefore appears notably smaller than those of contemporary adult males.”
Nesyamun’s smaller vocal tract results in the reconstruction of his voice being unusually high-pitched, but it is impossible to say whether his vocal tract has, in fact, shrunk post-mortem just like his tongue.
Even the researchers themselves admit that they have not reconstructed what Nesyamun’s voice would have sounded like when he was alive, but rather merely what his voice would sound like now if his mummy were suddenly reanimated. David Howard, the leader of the project is quoted in The New York Times article as saying that they have only reconstructed “the sound that would come out of his vocal tract if he was in his coffin and his larynx came to life again.”
ABOVE: Photograph of the 3D-printed model of Nesyamun’s vocal tract used by the researchers
Some more problems
Additionally, the voice that the Egyptologists have reconstructed for Nesyamun comes from a computer simulation, meaning it has a very noticeable computerized sound to it, sounding more like Siri or Stephen Hawking’s computer-generated voice than any voice coming from an actual human mouth.
Furthermore, there are other factors that significantly affect the sound of a person’s voice other than just the shape of their vocal tract. Different people have unique manners of speaking that are shaped by the culture in which they grew up, as well as their personal tendencies and speaking habits. Even a person’s emotional state at any given time can affect how they speak.
In fact, I would say that, most of the time, the way a person sounds to listeners has a lot more to do with culture than with the mere shape of their vocal tract. People from different regions and from different cultural backgrounds pronounce words in noticeably different ways, resulting in different accents.
Presently, we only have a vague impression of how Ancient Egyptian in general was pronounced and we know very little about the exact pronunciation of the language in the particular time and place in which Nesyamun lived. You can’t claim to recreate his voice unless you know exactly how the dialect he spoke was pronounced.
What researchers have reconstructed, then, isn’t Nesyamun’s actual voice; at the very best, it’s a computerized version of what this particular group of researchers think a person with a similar vocal tract to Nesyamun’s might sound like if their mummified body was brought to life. Even The New York Times article I referenced earlier quotes Piero Cosi, a speech expert from the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Italy as saying, “Even if we have the precise 3-D-geometric description of the voice system of the mummy, we would not be able to rebuild precisely his original voice.”
ABOVE: Modern reconstruction of what researchers think Nesyamun might have looked like when he was alive, based on analysis of his mummy. (Nesyamun is widely agreed to have been what we would consider black, serving as yet further proof that there some black people in ancient Egypt.)
Why are we even doing this?
In addition to being a highly dubious reconstruction, I have serious doubts about the productiveness of investing so much time and resources into trying to reconstruct the voice of a 3,000-year-old mummy. The fact is, even if we could reconstruct Nesyamun’s voice exactly as it really was, he would just sound like a human being. We really wouldn’t gain very much worthwhile knowledge from it.
The only benefit I can think of to reconstructing Nesyamun or any other dead person from antiquity’s voice is that this might help make history come alive for more people and help get the public more excited about ancient history. The problem is, the general public is already pretty much obsessed with ancient Egypt.
The public’s obsession with ancient Egypt is illustrated by the widespread popularity of speculative theories about the purpose of the pyramids (which I thoroughly debunk in this article I wrote earlier this month), the similarly widespread popularity of speculative theories about ancient Egyptian technology in general (one of which I debunk in this article from the beginning of this year), and the massive turnouts to museum exhibits showing treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun (which I wrote about in this article from November 2019).
What scholars should be focusing on is educating the public about ancient history—not resorting to cheap stunts to get the public excited, like claiming that they’ve reconstructed the voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy—which, of course, is something they haven’t really done and which I seriously doubt anyone will ever be able to do accurately.
ABOVE: Photograph of Tutankhamun’s gold funerary mask, which attracts thousands of visitors wherever it is displayed. The public is already fascinated by ancient Egypt. Scholars should focus on actually educating the public, rather than on pulling cheap stunts to attract attention.
A serious ethical problem
In addition to almost certainly being an unproductive pursuit, this whole endeavor to reconstruct Nesyamun’s voice from his vocal tract also raises serious ethical problems. Nesyamun was a real man who lived, breathed, spoke, and died over three thousand years ago in a culture with highly developed views about how corpses were supposed to be treated. He certainly must have had strong opinions about what he wanted to happen to his body when he died.
The fact is, we don’t know if Nesyamun would have approved of this treatment of his corpse. Although Nesyamun has been dead for a very long time, I’m really not sure that gives researchers permission to use his body for these kinds of blatant publicity stunts.
Now, the researchers have pointed out that the inscription on Nesyamun’s coffin states that he had a desire to have the ability to “speak” in the afterlife. They have declared this serves as Nesyamun’s documented consent to have his voice reconstructed. They write in their paper:
“In these texts, Nesyamun asks that his soul receives eternal sustenance, is able to move around freely and to see and address the gods as he had in his working life. Therefore his documented wish to be able to speak after his death, combined with the excellent state of his mummified body, made Nesyamun the ideal subject for the ‘Voices from the Past’ project for which his body was re-examined using state-of the-art CT scanning equipment.”
“Since human remains have unique status not as ‘objects’ but as the remains of once-living people (see SI), it was also necessary to consider the ethical issues raised by the research and its possible heritage outcomes. The team concluded that the potential benefits outweighed the concerns, particularly because Nesyamun’s own words express his desire to ‘speak again’ and that the scientific techniques used were non-destructive.”
This is a pretty blatant distortion of what the text on Nesyamun’s coffin says, though. In the text, Nesyamun expresses his desire for his spirit to be able to speak in the Egyptian afterlife—not his desire for researchers three thousand years later to put his mummified corpse in a CT scanner, create a model of his vocal tract using a 3D printer, and publish a recording of a sound created using that model and a computer program, claiming it to be “his” voice.
I’m not saying Nesyamun definitely wouldn’t have consented to this, but I am saying that it is really a stretch to take his words from his coffin as any form of consent to having researchers create a computerized sound based on a scan of his vocal tract and present it to the public as his actual voice.
Whether modern researchers should have to respect Nesyamun’s wishes about how he would have wanted his corpse to be treated is an open question, but it is a question that we really should be asking. This article from Hyperallergic notes that there is a very long history of westerners mishandling and mistreating Egyptian mummies for their own ends. It notes, “seen in this light… British researchers hyping how they synthesized the groan of an Egyptian mummy seems not merely cheap but disturbing.”
ABOVE: Detail of the lid of Nesyamun’s coffin, which is in the Leeds City Museum
The dehumanizing effect of this project
The researchers claim they were trying to humanize Nesyamun by giving him a voice, but, because they recorded only a single vowel sound and claimed it was “his voice,” the effect has been just the opposite of this. The vowel sound that the researchers recorded sounds too much like a moan of the sort we often associate with mummies in horror movies.
Consequently, the purported reconstruction of Nesyamun’s voice has been framed by the media in the context of depictions of mummy monsters in modern popular culture rather than in the context of what actual ancient Egyptian people were like when they were alive. For instance, a segment about the alleged mummy voice reconstruction from CBS This Morning that aired 25 January 2020 began with a montage of clips from cartoons and horror films about mummies. It ended with the anchors laughing and making fun of the voice reconstruction while making “mummy” gestures with their arms outstretched.
In the segment “Meanwhile…” from an episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that aired on 29 January 2020, Stephen makes fun of the researchers’ reconstruction of Nesyamun’s voice, saying, “I can’t believe that’s what mummies sound like. It’s gonna really knock some of the suspense out of our movies.” Stephen then plays a clip from the 1999 horror film The Mummy, only with the mummy’s blood-curdling screech replaced with the effete groan produced by the researchers using the 3D model of Nesyamun’s vocal tract.
Honestly, I don’t really blame the people over at CBS for framing the mummy voice reconstruction this way. The reconstruction itself is so daft that it naturally invites mockery and the researchers did a spectacularly terrible job of making Nesyamun seem like a real person. Thus, people fell back on what they knew: mummy movies and popular culture.
ABOVE: Screenshot of the titular mummy from the 1999 horror film The Mummy
