
Ardeth Bay (born in 1899) was an Egyptian Medjai chieftain and warrior that led a band of warriors patrolling the Sahara desert.
Biography[]
Ardeth Bay was sworn from manhood to ensure that none travel to Hamunaptra and "resurrect" the High Priest Imhotep from death, and tended to his duty with dedication, frightening off or killing all that reached the city.
One day in 1923 Ardeth Bay and his fellow Medjai warriors witnessed a battle taking place at Hamunaptra: a garrison from the French Foreign Legion had staked out in Hamunaptra, nearly all its men believing in it so much that without orders they trekked through Libya to find the ruins. The soldiers outnumbered the Medjai forces so greatly that any attack by the Medjai would be ineffective and would not disperse the troops enough to have them leave. After much gun-fighting and slaughter, the Tuaregs were brought down in numbers as were nearly all the men in the Legionnaire garrison, save for Rick O'Connell and Beni Gabor, a Legionnaire foot soldier that had chosen to hide in a doorway within the ruins. Frightened off by this new turn of events, O'Connell ran off from the ruins of Hamanaptra and into the deserts of the Sahara as the Medjai warriors watched on surreptitiously.
Three years after the battle between the Tuaregs and the Legionnaires, the Medjai received word from a loyal contact, the curator of a Cairo Museum, that the Museum's librarian Evelyn Carnahan had found a map leading to Hamunaptra. She and her brother Jonathan recruited O’Connell to lead them, and a team of Medjai assassins were sent out to intercept the barge ferrying the explorers down the Nile. Later he joined Rick and Jonathan when Imhotep supposedly resurrected and kidnapped Evelyn.