Mummies Buried with Golden Tongues
...and a Strange Papyrus with the “Catalog of Ships” from the Iliad Discovered in Oxyrhynchus (this is so Minoan...)
The Spanish archaeological team linked to the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East, under the direction of Doctors Maite Mascort and Esther Pons Mellado, has concluded the latest excavation campaign at the Oxyrhynchus site, in the Minya Governorate in Egypt, with the discovery of a necropolis corresponding to the Roman period whose structural and ritual characteristics provide significant data on the evolution of funerary customs in the transition between the Ptolemaic era and Roman imperial rule in Middle Egypt.
The fieldwork, carried out in the eastern sector of a Ptolemaic tomb catalogued as number 67 and discovered during the previous 2024 season, allowed the opening of a trench containing three chambers built with limestone blocks, of which only limited fragments remain due to structural deterioration accumulated over two millennia and the clandestine interventions the site suffered in antiquity.
Inside the first of these chambers, the archaeologists documented the presence of a stone slab and a large vessel whose contents consisted of charred human skeletal remains belonging to an adult individual, bones corresponding to an infant, and the skull of an animal identified as part of the feline family, all grouped and wrapped in textile fragments that show evidence of a ritual process of cremation and secondary inhumation that is very uncommon in the archaeological record of the area for this chronological horizon.
The second chamber revealed a similar arrangement with another vessel of analogous characteristics, inside which were deposited the incinerated remains of two people, again accompanied by the bones of a feline, highlighting a repeated intentionality in the ceremonial associated with these burials.
In the same southern area of the sector under intervention, the mission recovered a set of statuettes made of terracotta and bronze, among which stood out representations of the god Harpocrates under the iconography of a horseback rider, and a small figure of the god Cupid, grave goods that reinforce the Roman chronology of the context and the persistence of Greco-Egyptian syncretic cults in the region during the first
Meanwhile, the excavation of an underground funerary structure corresponding to a hypogeum identified as Tomb 65 allowed the exhumation of an undetermined number of mummies from the Roman period, some of which were found wrapped in linen bandages decorated with painted or woven geometric motifs, as well as several polychrome wooden sarcophagi which, although in an advanced state of decay due to the systematic looting to which the burial was subjected in past times, still preserve traces of their original pigmentation.
Among the objects deposited next to the bodies, specialists located three tongues made of gold and a fourth piece made of copper, amulets intended to ensure the deceased’s ability to speak before the tribunal of Osiris in the Afterlife—a practice documented in other Greco-Roman Egyptian sites but which in El-Bahnasa takes on special relevance due to its direct association with a hypogeum architectural context and the additional application of thin gold sheets on the surface of some of the examined mummies, denoting a high economic status of the individuals buried there.
The Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Sherif Fathy, received the preliminary report from the excavation directors, expressing his satisfaction with results that enrich the catalog of outstanding archaeological finds that the Minya Governorate has been providing in recent times, material evidence of the historical depth and cultural diversity that characterized this stretch of the Nile Valley throughout the different stages of Pharaonic civilization and its prolongation under foreign rule.
Dr. Hisham El-Leithy, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, detailed that the scientific implications of the discovery go beyond the mere recovery of sumptuary objects, since the excavation has offered unprecedented perspectives on the complexity of burial rituals in the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
In this regard, El-Leithy highlighted the discovery of an exceptionally rare papyrus located inside one of the mummies, a document containing a textual fragment of the second book of Homer’s Iliad*, specifically the passage known as the Catalog of Ships*, where the Achaean contingents that participated in the military expedition against the city of Troy are exhaustively listed.
The presence of this canonical literary text within a Romanized Egyptian funerary context introduces a scholarly and cultural dimension that had been scarcely represented in the site’s stratigraphy, connecting the daily life or intellectual aspirations of the local elite with the classical Greek heritage.
Mohamed Abdel-Badie, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector of the Supreme Council, specified the technical coordinates of the finding, confirming that the archaeological intervention was concentrated in the area immediately east of Ptolemaic tomb number 67, whose comprehensive documentation was completed in the 2024 campaign, and that the system of limestone chambers discovered in this new phase is in an extremely precarious state of conservation, with collapsed walls and roofs that barely allow the original layout of the funerary spaces to be reconstructed.
For his part, Dr. Hassan Amer, Professor of Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology of Cairo University and director of the excavations on behalf of the Egyptian team in collaboration with the Spanish mission, emphasized that the work inside the hypogeum designated as Tomb 65 confirmed the deposition of several mummies from the Roman period alongside wooden sarcophagi which, despite preserving traces of polychromy, show the severe deterioration caused by acts of looting perpetrated in antiquity, when tomb raiders broke the coffins and stripped the corpses of most valuable objects they might have carried, leaving behind however the metallic tongue amulets and the gold leaf applications adhered to the mummified fabrics.
The set of materials recovered by the expedition of the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East will now undergo the required preventive conservation processes, laboratory analyses, and photogrammetric documentation before being transferred to the museum storage facilities of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, while the epigraphic and papyrological study of the Homeric text extracted from the mummy’s wrappings could shed light on the degree of Hellenization of the Oxyrhynchite elites and the circulation of canonical literary texts in a provincial setting of Upper Egypt during Roman rule.
The combination of cremation structures in vessels, hypogeum chambers with traditional mummification, golden tongue amulets, and a fragment of the Iliad configures a hybrid funerary panorama that illustrates the coexistence and transformation of Egyptian traditions in contact with Greek customs and Roman imperial administration in a city that, centuries later, would become famous for the immense quantity of literary and documentary papyri recovered from its rubbish heaps.
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