Thin plates of gold, each cut into the shape of a human tongue, were still resting inside the mouths of mummified remains when archaeologists opened a cluster of tombs at Al-Bahnasa in central Egypt. The embalmers who prepared these bodies had also wrapped individual fingernails and toenails in gold leaf, as though armoring every extremity for eternity. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities confirmed the discovery in a statement that dates the burials to the Ptolemaic period, roughly the fourth through first centuries BCE, when a Greek-speaking dynasty ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great’s conquests.
The find emerged from the same sprawling necropolis where, just months earlier, a separate team pulled a fragment of Homer’s Iliad from inside a Roman-era mummy. As of June 2026, the two discoveries together are reshaping how scholars understand centuries of overlapping Greek and Egyptian burial customs at one of archaeology’s most storied sites.
Golden tongues and what they meant
The practice of placing a gold tongue plate in a mummy’s mouth was rooted in Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife. The dead needed to speak before Osiris and other gods during judgment, and a tongue made of imperishable metal ensured that ability would never decay. The ministry’s announcement describes multiple mummies fitted with these plates across several tombs in the Minya governorate, though it does not yet name the individuals or specify their social rank.
Al-Bahnasa is not the only Egyptian site to yield golden tongues. Excavations at Saqqara in 2021 and at Taposiris Magna near Alexandria have produced similar artifacts, suggesting the ritual was practiced across a wide geographic and social range during the Ptolemaic and early Roman periods. But the concentration of gold-adorned mummies at Al-Bahnasa, combined with the site’s extraordinary papyrus record, makes this cluster especially valuable for understanding how local elites invested in the afterlife.
Homer in a mummy’s wrappings
The second discovery came from a University of Barcelona archaeological mission working at the same Oxyrhynchus necropolis. During a field campaign running from November through December 2025, the team excavated Tomb 65 in Sector 22 and found a papyrus fragment inside a Roman-era mummy. The text was identified as a passage from Homer’s Iliad, according to the university’s English-language press release and a corresponding Spanish-language announcement.
The fragment joins a vast library of texts that Oxyrhynchus has surrendered over more than a century. British excavators Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began digging there in 1897 and recovered tens of thousands of papyrus scraps from ancient rubbish heaps and tombs. The resulting Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection, now largely housed at Oxford, includes lost plays by Sophocles, early Christian gospels, tax receipts, and private letters. Finding another piece of Homer at the site is not surprising in itself, but recovering one from inside a mummy rather than a trash deposit is notable because it ties the text directly to a funerary context and a specific individual.
The Barcelona team has not yet published the fragment’s exact passage, physical dimensions, or conservation details. Those will likely appear in a formal scholarly edition. For now, the identification rests on the university’s institutional statements.
Same cemetery, different centuries
The golden tongues and the Iliad papyrus share a geographic home but not a time period. The ministry dates the tongue-plate burials to the Ptolemaic era, which ended when Rome absorbed Egypt in 30 BCE. The Barcelona team dates the mummy containing the Homer fragment to the Roman period, which stretched from that annexation through the fourth century CE. The gap could be anywhere from a few decades to several hundred years.
That chronological distance matters. It shows that Al-Bahnasa’s necropolis served elite families across major political transitions and that Greek cultural markers persisted in burial customs long after the Ptolemaic state collapsed. A Ptolemaic-era family might commission golden tongues so their dead could address Egyptian gods; a Roman-era family, perhaps descendants of Greek settlers or Hellenized Egyptians, might tuck a beloved passage of epic poetry into a loved one’s wrappings. Both gestures reflect a world where Greek and Egyptian religious ideas were not competing alternatives but intertwined layers of the same funerary logic.
What the sources do and do not confirm
Readers should note an important distinction. No official Egyptian government statement currently links the Ptolemaic golden-tongue discovery directly to the Barcelona team’s Roman-era campaign. The ministry describes Ptolemaic tombs with gold artifacts; the Barcelona team describes a Roman-era mummy with a literary papyrus. Whether the two finds were made during the same excavation season or during separate campaigns is not specified in either institutional release.
Likewise, no primary source currently available confirms that the Roman-period mummies at Al-Bahnasa carried golden tongues. The association is plausible given the site’s long continuity, and golden-tongue burials are documented in Roman-era contexts elsewhere in Egypt, but it is not established for this specific set of Roman-era tombs. The connection between the two discoveries is geographic, not stratigraphic.
On the Egyptian side, the ministry’s summary offers limited detail about the individuals buried with the tongue plates. It notes multiple tombs and mummies but provides no names, titles, or descriptions of coffins and grave goods beyond the gold elements. Without that information, it is difficult to say whether the practice was restricted to a particular social class, religious group, or family lineage within Ptolemaic Oxyrhynchus.
Why Al-Bahnasa keeps delivering
Oxyrhynchus owes its extraordinary preservation to geography. Situated on the edge of the Western Desert about 160 kilometers south of Cairo, the site’s bone-dry conditions are ideal for preserving organic materials that would disintegrate in the damp Nile floodplain. Papyrus, linen, wood, and even gold leaf survive in near-original condition. That same aridity has kept the necropolis productive for archaeologists across generations, from the British campaigns of the late 19th century to the ongoing Spanish-Egyptian collaboration.
As more technical reports emerge from both the ministry and the Barcelona team, archaeologists and papyrologists will be able to refine the chronology, reconstruct the Iliad text in detail, and situate both the golden tongues and the papyrus fragment within broader patterns of burial practice. For now, the discoveries are confirmed, significant, and drawn from the same ancient cemetery. The precise relationships between them remain an open question, one that future excavation seasons at Al-Bahnasa are well positioned to answer.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
