Ancient Egyptian Mummy 'Brought To Life' Through Voice Recreation

In news that will have Rick O'Connell saying something awesome like "Here we go again" and then rolling out his emergency firearms stash, British scientists have "resurrected" an ancient mummy. Sort of.

The accursed undead in question goes by the moniker Nesyamun. Deceased some 3,000 years, he is believed to have been a priest, and thanks to modern Franken-science, he's back to keep slapping whatever the Osiris version of the Bible is against whatever the Ra version of the pulpit is. Or, at the very least, record a nice audiobook version of it.

That's because biomedical engineers at the University of London have utilized CT scans and 3D printing to recreate the long-dead Egyptian's larynx, creating a true to life simulation of what his voice sounded like. They were able to achieve this thanks to the well-preserved soft tissue in Nesyamun's tender young throat.

The priest's larynx, or voice box, was scanned using computer tomography, a process that would've resulted in jack diddly had his remains not been so expertly preserved. From there, researchers were able to fill in the gaps. From there, the pieces were 3D mapped and printed, then combined with an artificial larynx device used to simulate speech.

According to the Mirror, as a result of all of this painstaking and highly detailed work, scientists now know what it would sound like if Nesyamun, believed to be a high-ranking official at the Temple of Karnak, made sort of a soft "ah" sound. So that's something.

Corresponding author on the project Professor David Howard said of the endeavor, "This innovative interdisciplinary collaboration has produced the unique opportunity to hear the vocal tract output of someone long dead by virtue of their soft tissue preservation and new developments in technology, digital scanning and 3-D printing."

No word yet on the future of Nesyamun's ability to speak, or if he'll ever be able to say what he's really thinking: "you should have let me rest. Now begins a new and terrible reign."