CAIRO • Archaeologists working at a temple on the outskirts of the Egyptian city of Alexandria have found 16 human burial chambers there, the ministry of tourism and antiquities said recently.
At least one contained a human skull with a golden "tongue" in its jawbone. The tongue was made of gold foil and, according to the ministry, it was meant to ensure the deceased person would be able to "speak in the afterlife".
It was discovered at the Tapo-siris Magna Temple site, on the south-western outskirts of Alexandria. Other golden artefacts included a funeral mask with golden flakes arranged in the shape of a wreath and some gilded decorations depicting Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead.
During the time of the pharaohs, gold was often used to decorate the funereal masks of rulers like King Tutankhamen. It had also been moulded to encase the fingers and toes of the dead.
Golden tongues have been found in Egyptian remains before, said Dr Jennifer Houser Wegner, a curator of Egyptian artefacts at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, where several of these tongues are housed.
"For the Egyptians, gold was a material that had qualities of everlastingness. It never tarnished. It always shone brilliantly," she said.
According to the Egyptian ministry of tourism and antiquities, the tongue found at Taposiris Magna was meant to help the deceased converse with Osiris, the lord of the underworld, on their way to the afterlife.
The mummies found there were not particularly well-preserved. They date to a period more than 2,000 years ago, when Egypt was ruled by Greek Macedonians and later Romans.
The temple itself, according to the ministry, appears to have been built during the reign of King Ptolemy IV, a Macedonian king who ruled in the third century BC.
Queen Cleopatra VII, who reigned for about two decades before her death in 30 BC, was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic Dynasty before the Romans took over, and coins depicting her face have also been found in the temple.
A golden tongue would not have been uncommon in elite burials during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, said Dr Lorelei H. Corcoran, director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of Memphis in Tennessee.
"Within an Egyptian funerary context, its reference is to Spell 158 of the Book Of The Dead, which ensures that the deceased has the ability to breathe and speak, as well as to eat and drink, in the afterlife," she added.
"It may be conflated with the Greek funerary practice of placing a coin on or in the mouth of the deceased as payment for the ferryman, Charon, who transported the deceased across the River Styx to the Underworld."
The team of archaeologists who found the 16 tombs at Taposiris Magna was led by Dr Kathleen Martinez, a lawyer-turned-amateur-archaeologist from the Dominican Republic.
The team has been working for years to find Cleopatra's tomb and focused its efforts on Taposiris Magna. But the burial site of the famous queen, who reigned from Alexandria and was said to have died there, has not turned up yet.
Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that two golden tongues were found there and would be studied at the Alexandria National Museum before being put on display in museums across Egypt.
The latest discovery comes as Egypt is making a concerted effort to draw visitors to the country, which depends heavily on tourism.
In recent years, archaeologists have unearthed more than 100 delicately painted wooden coffins at the ancient burial ground of Saqqara, a 4,400-year-old tomb with rare wall paintings near Cairo, and remnants of a colossal Pharaonic statue in the working-class neighbourhood of Matariya.
NYTIMES
