A joint Egyptian and Spanish archaeological team working at the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus has recovered golden tongue amulets and golden nails from mummies buried at the Al-Bahnasa site in Egypt’s Minya governorate. The discovery, made by a mission from the University of Barcelona’s Institute of the Ancient Near East, spans tombs dated to the Ptolemaic period, while a separate excavation campaign in late 2025 opened a Roman-era tomb at the same sprawling necropolis. The overlap between these finds raises a pointed question: did the ritual practice of fitting the dead with gold tongues persist across centuries of political change at one of Egypt’s most important administrative centers?
Gold tongue amulets bridge Ptolemaic and Roman burial rites at Oxyrhynchus
Ancient Egyptians placed thin gold sheets shaped like human tongues inside the mouths of the dead. The belief was direct: a gold tongue would allow the deceased to speak before Osiris in the afterlife court. What makes the Oxyrhynchus finds striking is their geographic and temporal clustering. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has reported that golden tongues and golden nails were recovered from Ptolemaic-period tombs at Al-Bahnasa by the joint Egyptian and Spanish mission led by the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East, underscoring the ritual’s prominence in that phase of the cemetery’s use (ministry announcement).
Separately, a peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Medicine documented a golden tongue amulet inside the mouth of the so‑called “Golden Boy” mummy, examined through CT-based analysis. That research showed how these wafer-thin gold objects were positioned precisely on the tongue, confirming their ritual function rather than any decorative afterthought. The scanning work also demonstrated that non-invasive imaging can reveal such amulets without unwrapping fragile remains, setting a methodological standard for future analysis of newly excavated specimens from Oxyrhynchus and beyond.
The fact that golden tongue amulets appear in securely dated Ptolemaic burials at Al-Bahnasa, and that a Roman-era tomb complex at the same site has now been opened, suggests the practice was not simply abandoned when Rome absorbed Egypt after 30 BCE. Local priestly networks and funerary workshops at Oxyrhynchus likely maintained their own traditions regardless of which empire collected taxes. The city served as a regional capital under both the Ptolemies and Rome, meaning its religious institutions had administrative continuity that smaller settlements did not enjoy. If the same families of embalmers and priests operated across the political transition, the persistence of gold tongue rituals would reflect institutional memory rather than a broader empire-wide custom.
At the same time, the Oxyrhynchus finds highlight how local ritual could adapt within a changing cultural environment. Greek language and literature were deeply embedded in the city’s civic life, yet the funerary assemblages still foregrounded Egyptian concepts of judgment and speech in the afterlife. Golden tongues, placed where the physical organ once lay, materialized that concern with verbal agency before divine authorities. Their presence in tombs that also yield Greek texts illustrates a lived synthesis of traditions rather than a clean replacement of one religious system by another.
Homer’s Iliad and the Roman tomb that anchors the timeline
During the November to December 2025 excavation campaign, the University of Barcelona team opened Sector 22, Tomb 65 at Oxyrhynchus. Inside, they found Roman-era mummies, and subsequent analysis conducted between January and February 2026 produced a remarkable secondary discovery: a papyrus fragment of Homer’s Iliad was identified within the wrappings of one of the mummies. Oxyrhynchus has long been the single most productive source of ancient papyri in the world, and finding a literary text reused as mummy wrapping fits the site’s established pattern. Recycled papyrus was common in Roman-period Egyptian burials because the material was plentiful in a city with active Greek-language administration and a thriving scribal culture.
The Iliad fragment serves a practical archaeological purpose beyond its literary interest. Because the text is written in a datable Greek script and was found sealed inside a mummy within a stratigraphically defined tomb, it helps confirm the Roman date of Tomb 65. That dating matters because it places the tomb complex squarely in the period after Ptolemaic rule ended, strengthening the case that burial customs at Oxyrhynchus carried forward across the political boundary. The Ministry’s separate documentation of Ptolemaic golden tongues at the same site, combined with the Roman-era tomb’s contents, creates a chronological bracket that researchers can now examine for continuity or change in funerary practice.
Moreover, the presence of Homeric verse inside an Egyptian mummy points to the entanglement of identity in Roman Oxyrhynchus. The deceased was wrapped in a text that embodied Greek heroic ideals while being prepared according to Egyptian mummification techniques. If future work shows that such individuals also carried golden tongue amulets, it would vividly demonstrate how Greek literary culture and Egyptian eschatology coexisted within a single funerary package.
Gaps in the evidence and what to watch next
Several questions remain open. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities release describes golden tongues and nails from Ptolemaic-period tombs at Al-Bahnasa, but no published excavation log or object registry from the 2025 campaign has yet confirmed that golden tongue amulets were recovered specifically from the Roman-era Tomb 65. The University of Barcelona’s institutional statements focus on the Iliad papyrus and the tomb’s date but do not include a detailed description of any golden tongue specimens from the Roman context. That gap is significant. Without material confirmation that the Roman mummies in Tomb 65 also carried gold tongues, the hypothesis of cross-period continuity rests on proximity and circumstantial inference rather than direct proof.
For now, archaeologists must work with a layered picture. On one layer, there is firm evidence that golden tongue amulets were in use at Oxyrhynchus during the Ptolemaic period, anchored by the Al-Bahnasa tombs documented by Egyptian authorities. On another, the Roman-era Tomb 65 offers a securely dated setting in which Egyptian mummification, Greek language, and papyrus recycling intersect, but the presence of golden tongues there remains unverified in public reports. Between these layers lies a roughly three-century span in which local workshops may have continued, modified, or abandoned the practice without leaving an easily traceable record.
Future research can narrow these uncertainties in several ways. First, comprehensive publication of the 2025–2026 excavation data, including tomb inventories and conservation notes, would clarify whether any gold amulets were recovered from Tomb 65 or neighboring Roman burials. Second, targeted CT scanning of the Roman mummies, following the protocol used on the “Golden Boy,” could reveal hidden metal objects without disturbing the wrappings. Even a single confirmed golden tongue from a Roman stratum at Oxyrhynchus would strongly support the argument for ritual persistence.
Comparative work across Egyptian sites will also matter. If golden tongue amulets appear regularly in Roman-period cemeteries elsewhere, the Oxyrhynchus pattern would look less like a local anomaly and more like part of a broader, empire-wide trend in Egyptian funerary religion. Conversely, if such finds remain rare outside a few major centers, the case for localized priestly traditions shaping the city’s mortuary landscape would grow stronger. Either outcome would refine historians’ understanding of how religious practices navigated the political and cultural shifts from Ptolemaic to Roman rule.
Until those data emerge, Oxyrhynchus stands as a compelling but incomplete case study. The city’s golden tongues, its Homeric papyri, and its carefully wrapped mummies all testify to a community negotiating multiple identities at once. The next round of publications and imaging results will determine whether the gold tongues truly bridged the centuries between pharaonic tradition and Roman administration, or whether their story at Al-Bahnasa is, for now, confined to the Ptolemaic dead.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
