Archaeologists from a long-running Polish-Egyptian mission have pulled two dozen thin gold sheets, shaped like human tongues, from burial chambers at the ancient coastal site of Marina el-Alamein in Egypt. The finds, recovered during systematic excavation and conservation work along the Mediterranean shore west of Alexandria, point to a deliberate funerary practice in which gold foil was placed inside the mouths of the dead. The discovery raises pointed questions about why this ritual concentrated so heavily at a single port city and what it reveals about the movement of religious customs across the ancient Mediterranean world.
Gold tongue amulets and the stakes for Mediterranean burial studies
The placement of gold tongue-shaped objects in the mouths of the deceased is not unique to Marina el-Alamein. Similar finds have surfaced at other Egyptian sites dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, roughly the last three centuries BCE through the first centuries CE. What sets the Marina el-Alamein discovery apart is the sheer number found in a relatively compact cemetery. Two dozen examples from a single site represent one of the densest concentrations of this burial custom recorded in Egypt, and the pattern demands explanation beyond coincidence or generic religious tradition.
The working hypothesis among researchers is that Marina el-Alamein’s position as a trade hub along the coast shaped how its residents adopted and adapted burial customs from the broader Greco-Egyptian cultural sphere. A port city that hosted merchants, sailors, and travelers from across the Mediterranean would have been a natural mixing point for religious ideas. The gold tongues may reflect a belief, common in Ptolemaic-era Egypt, that the dead needed to speak before the gods in the afterlife, and that a golden tongue would grant them that ability. One way to test whether this practice was locally produced or imported would be to compare the chemical composition of the gold sheets with contemporary coinage and trade goods found in the same harbor layers. That analysis has not yet been published, leaving the question of origin open.
More broadly, the Marina el-Alamein material has implications for how archaeologists interpret the spread of mortuary rites across the eastern Mediterranean. If the custom turns out to be tightly clustered in time and space, it might point to a localized cult, perhaps tied to a specific sanctuary or priestly group in the town. If, instead, similar concentrations are eventually documented at other ports, the gold tongues could signal a wider network of shared ritual practice among coastal communities engaged in long-distance trade. Either way, the finds complicate older narratives that treated provincial Egyptian cemeteries of the Greco-Roman period as passive recipients of ideas flowing out from Alexandria and major temple centers.
What the Polish-Egyptian mission documented at Marina el-Alamein
The institutional framework behind the discovery is the Polish-Egyptian Conservation Mission, which operates under the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw. The mission’s remit covers both excavation and preservation, including the stabilization of exposed walls, pavements, and tomb façades in an environment where salt-laden sea air and shifting sands pose constant threats. This long-term presence has allowed archaeologists to build a detailed picture of the site’s urban layout and funerary zones rather than relying on isolated digs.
That continuity matters because the gold tongues were not chance finds pulled from a single trench. They emerged from a program of sustained, methodical excavation across multiple sectors of the ancient cemetery, documented over successive field seasons and integrated into a broader mapping of burial architecture. The consistent positioning of the gold sheets inside the mouths of the dead, repeated across numerous graves, points to a shared ritual practice rather than isolated acts of personal devotion. A peer-reviewed article in the journal Studies in Ancient Art and Culture describes these placement patterns in detail, emphasizing the care with which the thin foils were shaped and inserted.
Marina el-Alamein itself was a modest but active settlement during the Greco-Roman period. Situated on the Mediterranean coast roughly midway between Alexandria and the Libyan border, it served as a waypoint for coastal traffic and likely hosted seasonal residents alongside a permanent population. The architecture exposed by the mission includes townhouses with columned courtyards, bath complexes supplied by cisterns, and rock-cut tombs with decorated façades. The blending of Egyptian and Hellenistic features in this built environment provides a physical record of the cultural crosscurrents that shaped life and death at the site, and the gold tongues slot into that wider picture as one more example of hybrid religious practice.
Within the cemetery, the burials containing gold tongues appear among more conventional interments furnished with pottery, lamps, and occasional jewelry. The 2020 study notes that the tongue sheets are extremely thin, suggesting they were made specifically as ritual objects rather than cut from heavier ornamental pieces. Their presence in tombs that otherwise follow standard local patterns indicates that the community integrated this practice into existing funerary frameworks instead of creating a separate class of graves. That observation supports the idea that the amulets were meant to enhance, rather than replace, established rites for guiding the dead into the afterlife.
Unanswered questions about the gold, the dead, and the port
Several critical gaps remain in the published record. The full tomb-by-tomb inventory, including stratigraphic data that would allow researchers to date each burial precisely, has not been released in open-access form. Radiocarbon dates and ceramic chronologies tied to the specific graves containing the gold tongues appear only in summary, without the underlying lab reports that would let independent scholars verify the timeline. Without those details, it is difficult to determine whether the practice began at a specific moment and spread, or whether it persisted steadily across several centuries of use at the cemetery.
Equally unclear is the social profile of the individuals buried with gold tongues. The available publications do not yet provide a systematic breakdown of age, sex, or health indicators for these skeletons compared with the broader cemetery population. If future osteological work shows that the amulets cluster with children, for example, or with adults showing particular stress markers, that pattern could hint at how the community understood the need for enhanced speech or protection in the afterlife. For now, the association between the tongue foils and specific social groups remains speculative.
No public statements from Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities officials about the gold tongue finds appear in the available institutional or scholarly record. That absence leaves open the question of how the objects are being stored, conserved, and displayed. The fragile gold sheets require careful handling, and conservation treatment records for the objects themselves have not been included in the mission’s published materials or in the 2020 study. It is therefore not yet clear whether the amulets will eventually enter a museum collection accessible to visitors or remain primarily as research material associated with the site archives.
The chemical composition question also looms large. Gold sourced from Nubian mines, recycled from older Egyptian artifacts, or imported through Mediterranean trade networks would each carry a distinct elemental fingerprint. Matching the tongue amulets to a specific gold source would clarify whether the practice was supported by local wealth, temple resources, or commercial exchange. No such metallurgical analysis has been published for the Marina el-Alamein finds, and without it, discussions of economic and religious investment in the rite remain largely theoretical.
For readers tracking archaeological heritage in Egypt, the next development to watch is whether the mission releases a comprehensive open-access catalog of the burials and their contents. Such a dataset would allow comparative work with other Ptolemaic and Roman-era cemeteries across the eastern Mediterranean and could help settle the question of whether Marina el-Alamein’s concentration of gold tongues reflects a unique local tradition or a broader pattern that has simply been better preserved at this one well-excavated site. Until that data becomes available, the two dozen gold tongues from Marina el-Alamein stand as tantalizing but incomplete evidence of how a coastal community on Egypt’s northern frontier imagined the voice of the dead-and the power of gold-to shape the journey into the next world.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
