A team of Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered 13 ancient mummies with golden tongues and fingernails in a cemetery at the site of Oxyrhynchus. In a press release, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said that the dozens of mummies were discovered alongside ritual scenes of deities that had previously never been seen in the region. The team made the finds when they dug down to the bottom of a burial shaft, revealing a hall with three chambers that held the mummies.
The ancient Egyptians put gold tongues in mummies with the intention of helping the deceased speak in the afterlife, and because they believed that gold was “the flesh of the gods,” as per Live Science. The gold fingernails, on the other hand, are unique to this finding.
According to a press release, the mummies date back to the Ptolemaic period – roughly 304 BC to 30 BC. “This is the first of its kind in the archaeological area of Al-Bahnasa in Minya Governorate,” it read.
“The number of gold tongues here is high, which is interesting,” Salima Ikram, Egyptology professor at American University in Cairo told Live Science. “Possibly the bodies belong to higher elites that were associated with the temple and animal cults that proliferated in the area,” she added.
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Additionally, the team found 29 golden amulets, some in the shape of scarabs, the beetles that are commonly depicted in Ancient Egyptian antiquities. A beautiful wall painting was also discovered in the burial chamber. The work depicts several Egyptian deities, including Nut the sky-goddess who is depicted surrounded by stars.
“As for the paintings, the quality is really excellent and the freshness of colors is simply amazing,” Francesco Tiradritti, an Egyptologist at D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy who was not involved in the dig, told the outlet.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, a joint Egyptian-American mission of archaeologists discovered11 sealed burials in a tomb, near South Asasif necropolis, next to the Temple of Hatshepsut on the Nile’s West Bank in Luxor. According to Egypt’s Tourism and Antiquities Ministry, the 11 graves contained skeletons of men, women and children which indicated that it was a family grave that may have been used for several generations through the 12th Dynasty and the beginning of the 13th Dynasty.