A 3,000-Year-Old Mummy Speaks. Really.

The priest once known as Nesyamun has been a man of few words for the past 3,000 years—which is how things go when you’ve been dead since about 1000 BCE. But according to a study just published in Scientific Reports, he recently spoke in a lab in the United Kingdom, and the single syllable the mummified Nesyamun uttered could open the door to an entire chorus of voices from the ancient Egyptian past. One of the things that makes mummification special among interment rites is that unlike simple burial—in which bodies decay relatively quickly, leaving only bones behind—it preserves soft tissue. That makes it possible to study far more of the remains and determine much about the lives the mummies led and their health before their deaths. And provided you know what you’re doing, it can also tell you how they sounded. Individual voices are determined not just by the vocal cords, which vary from person to person, but also by the shape of the vocal tract—the mouth, throat and nasal cavity, which serve as a sort of echo and amplification chamber for the sounds the vocal cords produce. Skeletons do not retain these soft tissues; mummies do. In order to determine if it was possible to use a mummified vocal tract to reproduce a voice, a team led by D.M. Howard, a professor of electrical engineering at Royal Holloway, University of London, turned to Nesyamun, one of the world’s better-studied mummies. Discovered and transported to the Leeds City...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Archaeology Research Source Type: news