Archeologists in Egypt have discovered a 2,000-year-old mummy with a gold-tongue amulet meant to let the dead person “speak” — though hopefully not curse — in the afterlife.
Mummy curses are a purely tongue-in-cheek notion in 2021, but the discovery has nevertheless generated a flurry of excitement in Egypt and abroad.
Archeologists unearthed at least two mummies buried with the gold tongues in a poorly preserved crypt in Alexandria, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement. The mummies were found among 16 burial shafts at the temple of Taposiris Magna, which dates back to the Greco-Roman period some two millennia ago.
The tongues were a burial custom meant to ensure that individuals would have a tongue to speak with Osiris, god of the dead, in the afterlife, the ministry said.
Several other gold tongues have been found in the past, according to Jennifer Houser Wegner, curator of Egyptian artifacts at Penn Museum in Philadelphia. Her museum has a few of those tongues in its collection.
“For the Egyptians, gold was a material that had qualities of everlastingness,” she told the New York Times in a recent interview. “It never tarnished. It always shone brilliantly.”
The joint Dominican-Egyptian research team also uncovered eight marble masks, eight gold flakes representing the leaves of a gold wreath and some gilded fabric known as cartonnage, Egypt’s Independent newspaper reports.
The ministry says one mummy was decorated with tributes to Osiris. Another wore a crown decorated with horns and a cobra in the centre of the forehead. And a third had a falcon-head necklace representing the god Horus.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by MAGZOID staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)