A thin sheet of gold, pressed into the shape of a human tongue, sat inside the mouth of a mummy that had not been disturbed for roughly two thousand years. When a joint Egyptian-Spanish archaeological team opened tombs at Al-Bahnasa in Egypt’s Minya Governorate, they found multiple burials outfitted with gold foil coverings and ritual objects designed to prepare the dead for an audience with the gods. The discoveries, announced by Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the University of Barcelona between late 2025 and early 2026, span the Ptolemaic and Roman periods and include one of the most unusual literary finds in recent Egyptian archaeology: a papyrus of Homer’s Iliad laid across a mummy’s abdomen during embalming.
Gold for the dead at Oxyrhynchus
Al-Bahnasa sits about 160 kilometers south of Cairo along the Bahr Yussef canal. In antiquity it was called Oxyrhynchus, and it is one of the most prolific sources of ancient papyri ever found. British excavators in the early 1900s pulled tens of thousands of Greek and Latin fragments from the site’s rubbish heaps, recovering everything from lost plays by Sophocles to private letters and tax receipts. But the current Spanish-Egyptian campaign, led by the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East, has shifted focus to the cemetery zones, where intact tombs preserve not just texts but the full ritual context in which they were used.
According to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the team recovered golden tongues and golden nails from mummies inside Ptolemaic-period tombs at the site. The tongues are delicate sheets of gold cut to fit inside or over the mouth. The nails, similarly fashioned from gold, capped the fingers or toes. Both served the same underlying logic: gold was considered incorruptible, associated in Egyptian theology with the flesh of the gods themselves. Fitting a body with gold extremities meant the deceased could arrive whole and functional before divine tribunals in the afterlife.
The golden tongue tradition is well documented across Egypt. Archaeologists have recovered similar objects at Saqqara, Taposiris Magna, and Qewaisna, among other sites, dating from the late Pharaonic period through Roman rule. The practice reflects a specific belief about the judgment of the dead: upon entering the underworld, the deceased would need to speak before Osiris and a panel of 42 divine assessors, reciting declarations of innocence from what Egyptologists call the “Negative Confession.” A tongue made of imperishable gold ensured the dead could perform that speech. At Al-Bahnasa, the recovery of both tongues and nails together suggests embalmers were preparing the body for a full physical encounter with the gods, not merely adding symbolic decoration.
Homer’s Iliad inside a Roman-era mummy
The second major find came from a different part of the cemetery and a later period. According to a press release from the University of Barcelona, excavation of Tomb 65 in Sector 22 during November and December 2025 revealed a Roman-era mummy with a papyrus placed deliberately on its abdomen during the embalming process. Analysis carried out through January and February 2026 identified the text as Book II of Homer’s Iliad, the section known as the “Catalogue of Ships.”
That passage is essentially a long roll call of the Greek forces that sailed to Troy, listing commanders, cities, and the number of ships each contingent sent. It is one of the most formally structured portions of the Iliad, and in the ancient world it functioned almost as a reference text, widely copied and studied. Why an embalmer or a grieving family would choose this particular section to accompany the dead is not yet clear. The placement on the abdomen, integrated into the wrapping process, indicates it was not an afterthought but a deliberate part of the burial ritual. Whether the text was understood as protective, as a marker of the deceased’s education and status, or as something with its own perceived power in the afterlife remains an open question.
The find is remarkable partly because of where it was recovered. Most Oxyrhynchus papyri came from ancient trash dumps, stripped of any information about who owned them or how they were used. This copy of the Iliad was found in its original ritual context, physically bound to a specific person in a specific tomb. That kind of archaeological association is rare for literary papyri anywhere in Egypt.
Where Ptolemaic ends and Roman begins
One important nuance concerns dating. The Ministry’s documentation ties the golden tongues and nails specifically to Ptolemaic-period burials, which at Al-Bahnasa would predate 30 BCE, when Rome absorbed Egypt after the death of Cleopatra VII. The Iliad papyrus, by contrast, came from a tomb the university identifies as Roman-era. Both sets of finds come from the same sprawling cemetery, but the published institutional records do not confirm that golden tongues were also present in the Roman-period tombs excavated during the latest season.
This distinction matters because the two periods overlap at Al-Bahnasa. Burial customs did not change overnight when Roman administration replaced Ptolemaic rule. Distinguishing a late Ptolemaic tomb from an early Roman one requires ceramic analysis, stratigraphy, or radiocarbon dating, and neither the ministry portal nor the university press release details which techniques the team applied. It is entirely plausible, given parallels at other Egyptian sites, that Roman-period mummies at Al-Bahnasa also carried gold tongues or other gold fittings. But until detailed excavation reports or peer-reviewed studies appear, that connection remains an inference drawn from the broader pattern rather than a point confirmed for the latest Roman-era tombs specifically.
The exact number of gold-foiled mummies opened during the most recent season also lacks a clear figure in either institutional account. Neither source provides a specific count of mummies recovered, their individual conservation status, or whether any of the Roman-period burials combined Greek literary texts with Egyptian gold ritual objects in the same tomb.
A cemetery where two cultures met
What makes Al-Bahnasa’s cemetery so striking is the sheer density of cultural crossover packed into a single burial ground. Egyptian funerary theology, with its emphasis on bodily preservation and divine judgment, sits alongside Greek literary culture in the form of Homer’s epic. The golden tongues speak to a desire to address traditional Egyptian gods within a recognizable ritual framework. The Iliad papyrus points to an education steeped in Greek texts that had become classics across the eastern Mediterranean. Both were placed on the same kinds of mummified bodies, prepared by embalmers working in a tradition that stretched back millennia.
This kind of entanglement was characteristic of Roman Egypt more broadly. The province’s population included ethnic Egyptians, descendants of Greek settlers from the Ptolemaic period, Roman administrators and veterans, and communities of Jewish, Nubian, and other residents. Religious and cultural practices blended, diverged, and coexisted in ways that resist simple categorization. A family might worship Osiris, read Homer, and pay taxes to Rome without seeing any contradiction. The burials at Al-Bahnasa offer a physical record of those overlapping identities, frozen at the moment of death.
The excavation team plans to continue work at the site in future seasons, and more detailed publication of the finds is expected as conservation and analysis proceed. For now, the strongest claims rest on the two institutional records: gold tongues and nails confirmed in Ptolemaic tombs, and a copy of the Iliad confirmed inside a Roman-era mummy. The connections between those finds, and the fuller story of who was buried at Al-Bahnasa and what they believed, will sharpen as more tombs are opened and more data reaches publication. The cemetery, like the ancient city above it, still has a great deal left to say.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
