#nesyamun

By Rip Wiggles - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151872960

Nesyamun was a priest and scribe during the 20th Dynasty, in about 1100 BCE, during the reign of Ramesses XI in Karnak, which is near modern-day Luxor, Egypt. He held a very high within the temples there and had titles like 'god's father of Montu' and 'scribe of Montu', Montu being the god of war, an 'embodiment of the conquering vitality of the pharaoh'. He was accounted the cattle the temple raised and the daily meal for the gods. His wife was the daughter of Amenemtephis. His father-in-law was in one of those in charge of the 'Memnonium', the memorial temple for Ramesses II ('Ramasses the Great', also known as the 'Ramessum'). His son took his father-in-law's position after his grandfather. After his death, Nesyamun was buried near Hatshepsut's mortuary temple in the cemetery of priests and priestesses.

By Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-84) - Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien - Tafelwerke.

The reign of Ramesses XI, from 1107-1078 or 1077 BCE, marked the end of the 20th Dynasty as well as the end of the New Kingdom. He lost power to the High Priests of Amun in Upper Egypt (the southern part of Ancient Egypt) and even over Lower Egypt by the time of his death to Smendes, who founded the 21st Dynasty. While he was the last of the 20th Dynasty, its downfall started under the Reign of Ramesses IV, Ramesses VI, and Ramesses VIII, sons of Ramesses III who vied for power, as well as a series of low Niles, periods of drought in which the Nile didn't flood as much as it usually did. During the 20th Dynasty, the Late Bronze Age collapse happened, which likely had its roots in drought around the Mediterranean area, causing the chaos that led to the Sea Peoples attacking in a wave around the region. Likely depictions of Sea Peoples appeared on Ramesses III's mortuary temple at Medinet Habou. Ramesses IX inherited a kingdom on the decline, full of unrest and corruption, unable to do much about it.

By Tomohawk - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4232889

Nesyamun's coffin was found in the early 1820's by an Italian trader and was sent to Trieste, Italy. He was then bought by English antiquities dealer William Bullock from someone who transported him to England. From there, he was bought by John Blayds for the Leeds Philosophical and LIterary Society museum. His coffin was opened in late 1824 to be studied. His was 'one of the earliest scientific examinations to be undertaken on an Egyptian mummy', including notes on how his body was unwrapped, the items that were wrapped up with him, and attempts as reading his coffin texts, where his name was written 'Natsif-Amon'. He was placed on display in 1854 under the name 'Ensa-Amoun'. His was the only body not to be damaged in the Leeds Blitz bombing on the 15th of March, 1941. in 1990, his body was studied again with newer technology such as X-rays and CT scans, leading to diagnoses such as arthritis, parasitic worms, and a death likely due to a sever allergic reaction. In 2008, he was moved to the Leeds City Museum.

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/listen-recreated-voice-3000-year-old-egyptian-mummy-180974048/

In 2020, a team used a CT scan from 2016 to recreate Nesyamun's vocal tract in an attempt to discover what he would have sounded like when he was alive. Efforts were made to reconstruct how his muscles would have looked like in his life, with mummification dehydrating the body, especially his tongue, which faced the most desiccation. The team plans to continue the research on how to improve their modeling to overcome these difficulties. There are those who feel this is questionable at best, desecration at worst.

It was an ethical clusterfuck of epic proportions, and basically all of Egyptology went “What??? the fuck??????”. 

The main point is, of course, that a mummy can’t consent to any type of research done on their bodies. That’s why we have ethics in place, and almost every Egyptologist I know has either been taught ethics over the course of their degree, or, if they got their degree prior to ethics becoming more and more of a concern (as it should), worked to teach themselves. The scientists involved with this research are, barring one, not Egyptologists, and basically they treated Nesyamun as having never been anything more than an inanimate study object. They did try to give an ethical justification, but this “justification” was based on a poor and partial reading of Egyptian funerary beliefs. It was, quite frankly, more of an insult than it was a justification.

They used one of Nesyamun’s epithets, as written on his coffin, namely mAa-xrw, ‘justified’, or more literally: ‘true of voice’. This was claimed to denote Nesyamun’s wish to “speak and be heard after death by the living”. From their paper (emphasis mine):

This was a vital clarification within ancient Egyptian culture in which the name was regarded as essential to an individual as their physical (mummified) body and their soul (ka) and spirit (ba). It was also a fundamental belief that ‘to speak the name of the dead is to make them live again’ (alternatively translated: ‘a man is revived when his name is pronounced’), both by living relatives and by the deceased themselves when appearing before the gods of judgement. Only those able to verbally confirm that they had led a virtuous life were granted entry into eternity and awarded the epithet ‘maat kheru’, ‘true of voice’, as applied to Nesyamun himself throughout his coffin inscriptions. 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.

Two problems already:

mAa-xrw is an epithet given to literally every deceased person. A deceased becomes mAa-xrw by virtue of having passed through the afterlife trials; it was nothing specific to Nesyamun.

mAa-xrw, and by extension the desire to be able to speak one’s own name in death, does not mean they want their mummy to physically speak in the realm of the living. mAa-xrw is a state of being, not a wish to enact.

So their justification was, if not an outright deliberate twisting of Egyptian funerary beliefs, at the very least a complete misunderstanding of these beliefs. If you read the rest of the paper, it becomes clear they’re mostly doing it for the interest it’d garner among a lay public. They talk about how it can “excite” people to hear “a mummy’s voice”, etc. But the research as it is did literally nothing to further the field of Egyptology, when that’s the only valid reason to even begin thinking about doing research on a mummy.

This is all bad enough, but it doesn’t stop there!

Another concern is the fact that after three millennia, even though Nesyamun was preserved so well, his voice box still was not complete. They would have to reconstruct the fleshy flappy parts from scratch anyway if they wanted a fully functional box. So this whole thing was all moot because it would never be able to approximate Nesyamun’s voice in life. Even if it had been able to, what would be the use? It’s not like we can ask the reconstructed voice box how to pronounce Late Egyptian. All we can do is make it say the things we want it to say.

This is usually the point where non-experts will - usually in good faith - point out that this type of research can be valuable for living people with incomplete/non-functional voice apparatuses. To them I have only one thing to say: it would NOT be hard to find living subjects who can actually consent to being scanned and having 3D-printed reconstructions done based on their voice box. 

And lastly, they used their own voices to make Nesyamun’s voice box emit a sound not unlike a dying goat. A human being, reduced to memes and laughter on the internet, because of these researchers’ vanity project.

And then they had the gall to say that “the benefits outweight the concerns”:

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 really quite astonishing. It’s not really his voice, but his sound. And why they were able to discern what it might sound like is interesting, as well.

Have you listened to the recreated voice of the ancient Egyptian mummy yet?

There is a lot that science can tell us about ancient cultures and civilizations, but for all the advancements we can make, one element—often thought to be lost forever—is sound. How did ancient people talk? What did their voices sound like? One would need a time machine to truly find out.

Or maybe just a 3D printer.

New work being done by a team of speech scientists from Royal Holloway,…