Beneath the farmland of Minya governorate in central Egypt, a team of archaeologists recently opened a cluster of sealed tombs at Al-Bahnasa and found something striking: mummies sheathed in gold foil, their mouths fitted with tongues made of hammered gold. The site, better known to classicists as Oxyrhynchus, has been yielding ancient papyri for more than a century. But these burials, announced by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in early 2025 and still under active study as of June 2026, add a physical, bodily dimension to a place long associated with texts.
The golden tongues are not decorative. Egyptologists interpret them as ritual devices placed over the mouths of the dead so they could speak before Osiris during the weighing of the heart, the judgment scene that determined whether a soul would enter the afterlife. The practice appears across late-period Egyptian burials, but finding multiple examples in a single cemetery cluster, alongside gilded nails, scarabs, and amulets depicting protective deities, points to a community of elites who invested heavily in preparing their dead for that divine audience.
What the ministry confirmed
Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has documented the recovery of golden tongues and nails from mummies inside tombs it attributes to the Ptolemaic period, the era of Greek-descended pharaohs that ended with Cleopatra VII’s death in 30 BCE. The mummies wore gilded cartonnage, a layered material of linen and plaster molded to the body and then painted or covered in gold leaf. Associated grave goods included amulets and imagery consistent with traditional Egyptian religious beliefs about death and resurrection.
The ministry’s announcement places these tombs in the Bahnasa region and dates them on the basis of architectural style and artifact typology. No radiocarbon results or detailed stratigraphic reports have been made public. The Ptolemaic attribution is credible given the artifact assemblage, but readers should note that technical publication is still pending.
Homer inside a mummy
Working at the same sprawling necropolis, the University of Barcelona’s archaeological mission made a separate but related discovery. The team, operating under the university’s Institut de Pròxim Orient Antic (IPOA), recovered a papyrus fragment of Homer’s Iliad from inside the wrappings of a mummy it dates to the Roman period, meaning after 30 BCE.
A philologist on the IPOA mission identified the fragment as lines from Book II of the Iliad, the section known as the Catalogue of Ships, which lists the Greek forces that sailed to Troy. That passage is among the most frequently preserved portions of the epic in the papyrological record, but finding it inside a mummy rather than in a rubbish heap, the source of most Oxyrhynchus papyri, changes its significance. The university’s announcement states the text was found in situ within the bandages, not in a separate container or secondary deposit.
A faculty-level report from IPOA credits a named specialist with the identification and frames the find as evidence that Greek literary culture had penetrated Egyptian funerary practice in provincial Roman Egypt. The implication is that a passage of Homer may have served a protective or identity-marking function similar to the traditional Egyptian Book of the Dead, though the university stops short of making that claim explicitly.
Same cemetery, different centuries
The analytical tension in these discoveries lies in chronology. The gold-tongue burials are officially Ptolemaic. The Iliad mummy is Roman. Both come from Al-Bahnasa, but no published source places them in the same tomb or even the same excavation trench. The overlap is geographic and thematic: a single necropolis where Egyptian religious symbolism and Greek textual culture both shaped how the dead were prepared.
Whether the gold-tongue practice extended continuously from the Ptolemaic into the Roman period at this site remains an open question. Golden tongues have appeared in Roman-period burials elsewhere in Egypt, including finds at Quweisna in the Nile Delta, so the practice was not exclusively Ptolemaic. But at Al-Bahnasa specifically, the published evidence does not yet bridge the gap. The Ptolemaic tombs could represent an older burial phase that Roman-era interments later occupied or built alongside, a common pattern across Egyptian cemeteries where tomb shafts were reused across centuries.
No osteological analysis, radiocarbon dating of linen wrappings, or stratigraphic phasing has been released for either set of burials. Until those technical reports appear, the relationship between the gold-tongue mummies and the Iliad mummy rests on site-level association rather than a documented shared burial assemblage.
What Al-Bahnasa tells us about death in a changing empire
Even with those caveats, the combined picture at Al-Bahnasa is significant. Oxyrhynchus was a regional capital, a Greek-speaking administrative center governing a stretch of the Nile Valley. Its residents lived under Ptolemaic kings, then Roman emperors, but they buried their dead in ways that drew on older Egyptian traditions. Gold tongues ensured the deceased could argue their case before the gods. A Homeric text tucked into bandages may have served a parallel purpose, wrapping the dead in the authority of a canonical Greek epic the way earlier generations wrapped them in spells from the Book of the Dead.
The site has been famous since British papyrologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began excavating its ancient rubbish mounds in 1897, pulling out hundreds of thousands of papyrus fragments that reshaped the study of the ancient world. But those texts came from trash. The Iliad fragment from the IPOA mission came from a body. That distinction matters because it moves the papyrus from the category of discarded document to ritual object, chosen and placed with intention.
For the gold-tongue mummies, the ministry’s finds reinforce a pattern visible at other late-period and Greco-Roman cemeteries across Egypt: elites who could afford gold leaf used it to mark the body’s most important thresholds, the mouth for speech, the fingertips for touch, the eyes for sight. These were not ornaments for the living to admire. They were functional equipment for the dead, designed to work in a realm no one could verify but everyone, apparently, prepared for with considerable expense.
Full excavation reports from both the Egyptian ministry and the University of Barcelona mission are expected to clarify the stratigraphy, dating, and artifact associations at Al-Bahnasa. When those publications arrive, they may confirm that gold-tongue burials and Greek literary inclusions coexisted in the same tombs, or they may show two parallel but distinct traditions occupying neighboring ground. Either outcome would deepen what is already one of the most layered archaeological sites in the Mediterranean world.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
