Voice of a mummy returns!
The voice of a 3,000 year old mummy returns can now be heard again thanks to modern technology that involves X-rays. How is modern science revealing secrets of the past?
Wouldn’t being able to hear a voice from the past be of utmost mystery? After all, what did our ancestors sound like? You might be aware that no two people have the same voice. It is as different as our finger prints or our DNAs. But perhaps, we may just be allowed to fantasise that there might be one person in history who shared your voice. Thanks to X-ray technology, we can now hear at least one voice from the past. Furthermore, X-ray technology in the form of micro-CT scanning is also helping us improve understanding of the relation between humans and animals in the past.
X-rays were discovered accidentally by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895. A century later, they have become ubiquitous in medicine. This is because of their special property that they can pass through your body without being absorbed much. This has to do with their specific wavelengths — conveniently situated in a range that is not absorbed much by the atoms of our body. This allows us to indirectly peer inside of the human body without having to cut it open.
The use of X-rays in technology has become widespread with the invention of CT scan — computerized tomography (CT) scan. In this method, the patient is still and X-rays are scanned through the body at different angles and various locations. The X-rays that have not been absorbed are collected at the other end of the body and their intensities are compared with the incident intensities. The body can be imagined to be composed of several tiny parts, namely voxels, and the density in the each voxel can then be calculated. These densities can be calculated because X-rays are scanned in various angles and locations across the body. Computing the density of all these voxels helps us reconstruct images of cross-sections of the body — including bones, blood vessels and soft tissues inside your body.
In recent studies, researchers have used CT scanning to reconnect with Ancient Egypt. In ancient Egyptian culture, an individual was believed to be comprised of three main entities: their physical body, their divine vital force (ka) and their personality and soul (ba). When a person died, their ka left them while their ba travelled the underworld to hope to be reunited with the ka. This would happen only after the ba passed the divine judgement. We now believe that this is why they preserved the bodies of the dead. The process of mummification was to allow the ba to navigate afterlife and to reunite with the ka. In doing so, the Egyptian civilisation has left modern man with enormous information about the way of life during those times. And now researchers have been using CT scans to find out more about it.
I would like to highlight two such studies: one in which the voice of a mummy was recreated and the other in which the mummies of several animals were scanned to understand which animals they were and to know how they died.
In the first study, they resurrected the voice of a priest, Nesyamun, who has long been mummified. Nesyamun lived over 3000 years ago under the rule of the pharaoh Ramses XI. He was a scribe and priest and used his voice to perform rituals and sing songs to the Gods. Reconstructing his voice was only possible because the soft tissue in his throat was not greatly damaged.
Voice is produced by the voice box/larynx and is our very own musical instrument. The precise structure of an individual’s voice box produces a sound unique to them. If this voice box is printed using a 3D printer and then connected to an electronic source, the voice produced by this vocal tract can be reconstructed. And this is exactly what the researchers did.
They performed CT scans of Nesyamun’s larynx and throat. Following that, they created a 3-D printed tract that was used with an electronic larynx source. Although the phonetics and timing patterns of his language are not known today, we can still listen to what the voice might have sounded like using this procedure. Nesyamun’s coffin inscriptions make a request that his soul might address the gods as he had in his working life. Thus his desire to make incantations has come one step closer after 3000 years.
In another study, researchers studied three animal mummies. To study the animals, they used micro-CT rather than CT. The difference is that micro-CT divides the body into voxels of a much smaller size than CT scanning. This also limits the volume studied in micro-CT scanning though, perfect for specimens of small size.Ancient Egyptians mummified animals for various reasons: they might have been pets; perhaps they were offered as food for human mummies in the afterlife or as food for Gods; the animals could have been sacred.
These scans allowed them to understand that the snake was dehydrated to death and revealed the poor conditions in which the snake was kept when it was alive. Another scan of a mummy revealed a cat which had its neck broken. The teeth of the cat pointed its age to be less than five months old when it died. Thus, studying animal mummies revealed a bit more about the human-animal interaction in ancient Egypt.
What did you think of it? Would you like your voice to be preserved 3000 years later from now? And what do you think future scholars would think of our world today? Oh, and here’s the voice. Don’t listen to it when you’re alone: it can be quite scary!