A team of scientific researchers have been able to recreate the voice from a 3,000-year-old mummy – but be warned, it’s probably not what you’re expecting.
Mummies have long held a strange fixation over the living ever since their discovery.
Egyptomania became so widespread during the Victorian times that curious people who were able to get their hands on mummies couldn’t resist unwrapping them, while an incorrect translation of the word ‘Mumia’ led to some people grounding up bodies and consuming them in an act of medical cannibalism.
Curiosity with the ancient world never really left us either, with TV and film productions often featuring groaning reanimated mummies as bad guys.
But have you ever wondered what the mummies themselves would have to say about this?
Have you ever wondered what the people of the ancient world sounded like? (Getty Stock Images)
Well, now you don’t have to.
Back in 2020, a team of research scientists in Leeds were able to successfully 3D print the mouth and vocal chords of a mummy named Nesyamun, a priest who is believed to have lived between 1099 and 1069BC.
Take a listen to the recreation of his voice here:
Now I highly doubt any of us were expecting to hear the team be able to recreate complex speech from their experiment, but I’d imagine we were all hoping to hear something a little more exciting than a handful of groans.
So why couldn’t the team create anything more than just a couple of grunts from the mummy? This is because Nesyamun’s tongue muscles had completely deteriorated over the 3,000 years he’d been dead, which meant the scientists were working with limited resources for their project.
Unsurprisingly the results received a mixed reaction from the public. Several listeners were completely baffled by what they were hearing while others simply found the entire situation amusing.
Finding themselves in the latter camp were the presenters of American news show CBS Mornings, who couldn’t resist giggling at the noise after hearing the report for this first time.
The presenters of CBS This Morning were in stitches (CBS)
Nesyamun may never have anticipated become a meme thousands of years after his death (YouTube/CBS Mornings)
After hearing Nesyamun’s ‘voice’ the presenters couldn’t help themselves and burst out laughing at the clip, before attempting to explain how the sound had been created.
“That’s reaching the limit of how many times I could hear it, it’s like between eight and ten,” one presenter joked, while another attempted to explain the lack of tongue situation.
“You cannot create words without having the tongue,” another explained.
Unfortunately for poor Nesyamun, people in the comments weren’t feeling particularly sympathetic either, with one viewer writing: “Poor dude, bullied by the whole internet 4000 [sic] years after his death lmaoo,” while a second joked: “Imagine being a meme after thousands of years later.”
