Did you hear that a mummy talked?
No, this isn’t from one of the great Brendan Fraser Mummy* movies. Thanks to science, a 3,000-year-old mummy spoke for the first time since his death (one assumes.)
It’s not easy to get a mummy to talk. Vocal cords are made up of soft tissue and don’t preserve well. Skeletons can’t talk at all. But Nesyamun, a mummy first unwrapped in 1824, had well-preserved vocal cords.
The fact that scientists brought back the voice of this particular ancient Egyptian is quite the coincidence because Nesyamum worked for the pharaoh Ramses XI as a scribe and priest. He would have used his voice often for rituals. (Do you think the embalmers put a spell on him so that someday he would talk again?)
If you want to know how they reproduced Nesyamum’s voice, check out this article from Nature. It has every detail (there were a lot of steps.)
If you’re hoping that the mummy said a complete sentence, you’re going to be disappointed. The sound that was made was short and sounded like a vowel because the vocal chord was frozen in one position. Vocal cords change shape as people speak, so only one sound can be created from the mummy. Plus, our tongue helps us make sounds, and poor mummified Nesyamum doesn’t have hardly any tongue left.
Listen to the sound of the mummy here. What do you think he is saying? I presume that it relates to his last words ever spoken, which is fascinating. (Perhaps he said, “Death is only the beginning.“)
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