Have you seen that viral video of a 3,000-year-old mummy screaming in pain? It’s racked up over 10 million views on Twitter alone. There’s just one problem: The video is edited to make the mummy sound funnier.
Yes, researchers really did recreate a mummy’s vocal chords using a 3D printer back in 2019. And CBS News covered the accomplishment in January of 2020. The original video, from CBS This Morning, is available online for anyone to watch.
Gizmodo even wrote about the experiment, explaining that the sound conjured from the mummy, a man named Nesyamun, was, “rather underwhelming and somewhat unbecoming of an esteemed Egyptian priest.” Some internet jokester must’ve thought the same thing, helping spice up the video with their own edit soon after we wrote about it.
It’s not clear who first created the edited joke version of the video but we know it originally became popular on YouTube on the channel of user kmlkmljkl in January of 2020. The video has racked up over 4.5 million views on the platform and it’s obvious from many of the comments that most people don’t know it’s a joke.
The edited video:
The original video, as it aired on CBS:
There’s one more wrinkle to this whole thing that internet trivia fans will appreciate. That mummy yell from the joke video isn’t just a random yell. It’s the voice of an artist named MC Ride, performing with his hip hop group Death Grips on their 2011 song “Guillotine (It Goes Yah).”
YouTube even has its own edited video of MC Ride just making that shouting sound for an hour. If you thought the yell sounded familiar, you weren’t wrong.
So there you have it. Yes, scientists really did make a mummy yell. But it wasn’t very funny when they did. The internet helped spice it up by sampling the yell from a hip hop artist. And the rest was viral video history.