About 3,000 years after his death, scientists have given voice to an Egyptian mummy, The New York Times reported.

Researchers used a CT scanner and 3D printer to recreate the vocal tract of an ancient Egyptian priest named Nesyamun, whose mummified remains have spent the last 200 years at the Leeds City Museum in England, according to the Times.

“The synthesis of his vocal function allows us to make direct contact with ancient Egypt by listening to a sound from a vocal tract that has not been heard for over 3,000 years,” researchers wrote in a paper published Thursday in Scientific Reports, according to CNN.

The scientists recreated one sound with the 3D printed vocal tract, “a vowel-like sound that is reminiscent of a sheep’s bleat,” according to BBC News.

“The actual mummification process was key here,” said Joann Fletcher, an Egyptologist at the University of York in England and one of the authors of the paper, according to the Times. “The superb quality of preservation achieved by the ancient embalmers meant that Nesyamun’s vocal tract is still in excellent shape.”

David Howard, a professor of electrical engineering at Royal Holloway, University of London, who was involved in the project, has used this same method to recreate the vocal tracts of living people, CNN reported. His research found that the sounds from the artificial tracts were very realistic.

This is the first time that this method had been used with human remains. Howard points out that there is difference between reproducing the sound of Nesyamun’s voice and Nesyamun actually speaking, according to CNN.

“It’s not, in fact, a sound he would ever likely have made in practice because the bulk of his tongue isn’t there,” Howard told CNN.

Nesyamun was a priest at the temple of Amun in the Karnak complex in Thebes who lived between 1099 and 1069 B.C., according to the BBC. He lived during the reign of Ramses XI, the only mummy to have been dated from that time.

Nesmayun had an “express wish” for his voice to be heard in the afterlife, John Schofield, an archaeology professor at the University of York, told the BBC.

“It’s actually written on his coffin — it was what he wanted,” Schofield told the BBC. “In a way, we’ve managed to make that wish come true.”