Why These Mummies Were Buried With Golden Tongues

At the bottom of a burial shaft in Middle Egypt, archaeologists stepped into a hall with three chambers branching off it, each crowded with mummies laid carefully side by side. On thirteen of the bodies, thin sheets of gold had been fitted over the mouth, shaped to replace the tongue. The discovery of these golden tongues was announced in September 2026 by Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, and it immediately raises a question for anyone reading about it now: why would anyone bury the dead with a golden tongue?

The find came from Oxyrhynchus, known today as Al-Bahnasa, in Minya Governorate west of the Nile. A joint Egyptian-Spanish mission from the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East, co-directed by Esther Pons Mellado and Maite Mascort, recovered the mummies from a tomb dated to the Ptolemaic period, roughly 304 to 30 BCE. The chambers held dozens of mummies placed side by side, suggesting a communal burial, and the team also recovered twenty-nine amulets shaped like scarabs, djed pillars, Wadjet eyes, and the deities Horus, Thoth, and Isis.

The golden tongues were not the only gold in the tomb. One mummy wore thin gold covers shaped like fingernails, and a heart scarab was found still in position inside another body. According to the ministry's statement, the golden nails had a protective role, meant to shield the body from corruption and guard the dead against hostile forces in the afterlife. The trove also included funerary pottery, canopic jars that once held the removed organs of the deceased, and four limestone sarcophagi.

The most richly decorated chamber belonged to a tomb owner named Wen-Nefer. Its walls carry elaborate painted scenes showing Wen-Nefer and his family presenting offerings to Anubis, Osiris, Atum, Horus, and Thoth. On the ceiling, the sky goddess Nut appears surrounded by stars and sacred boats carrying deities, while one scene shows the deceased being embalmed with the face coated in a thin layer of gold. As reported by Archaeology magazine, the chambers held well-preserved paintings of Wen-Nefer with Egyptian deities, a star-covered Nut, and a boat carrying multiple gods, with some goddess references appearing at the site for the first time.

Why Golden Tongues Were Given to the Dead

For ancient Egyptians, gold was no ordinary metal. "For the Egyptians, gold was a material that had qualities of everlastingness," said Jennifer Houser Wegner, a curator of Egyptian artifacts at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, as reported by the Daily Galaxy. "It never tarnished. It always shone brilliantly." Because gold was considered the flesh of the gods, placing a golden tongue in the mouth of the dead was understood to give the deceased the power of speech at the most important hearing of their existence: the judgment before Osiris.

That hearing was not a metaphor. According to ScienceAlert, Egyptian belief cast the underworld as the Silent Land, ruled over by Osiris, the Lord of Silence, where the dead were bound by a strict rule of speechlessness. A golden tongue was the exception to that silence. Where an ordinary tongue would fail, a golden tongue let the deceased plead their case before the court of Osiris and ask for mercy on their soul. The tomb, in this reading, was a courtroom, and gold was the one material that guaranteed the dead could testify.

A Timeline of Golden Tongues Found Across Egypt

Oxyrhynchus is not the first site where this practice has been found, but it has produced the largest single group. The timeline begins in January 2021 at Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria, where an Egyptian-Dominican mission led by Kathleen Martinez uncovered sixteen rock-cut burials and found one mummy with a gold tongue in its mouth. The same dig turned up gold beads shaped like Osiris, a crown decorated with horns and a cobra, and a golden necklace in the shape of a hawk, the symbol of Horus, as reported by MRU.

Later in 2021, three more golden tongues surfaced on mummies of a man, a woman, and a child dating back more than two and a half millennia. Excavators at the Quweisna necropolis in the central Nile Delta found more of them alongside skeletons with bones glazed in gold and burials set with gold scarabs and lotus flowers, the flowers symbolizing creation and rebirth. And at Oxyrhynchus itself, the same University of Barcelona mission had already recovered some from the site, including a pair that Live Science reported brought the known total there to sixteen. What makes the September 2026 announcement stand out is concentration: thirteen golden tongues in one tomb complex, alongside golden fingernails, twenty-nine amulets, and fully painted walls — the fullest picture yet of how the ritual actually looked in practice.

Scholars Debate Who Earned a Golden Tongue

Not everyone agrees on what they meant. "The number of gold tongues here is high, which is interesting," Salima Ikram, an Egyptology professor at the American University in Cairo, told Live Science, as reported by the Daily Galaxy. She offered two readings: the dead may have been elites connected to the local temples and animal cults, or fitting golden tongues may simply have been routine work for the embalming workshop operating in the area. In other words, was a golden tongue a status symbol, or was it standard issue?

There is also the matter of what did not survive. As ScienceAlert notes, golden tongues are rarely found in Egyptian tombs, at least partly because of looting — gold has always attracted thieves. The thirteen tongues that remain may be only a fraction of what the tomb once held, which makes the painted walls and the amulets all the more valuable as evidence of the beliefs that filled the chamber. That tension between what was buried and what survived is part of what makes the Oxyrhynchus find so significant: it is one of the few places where the ritual arrived nearly intact.

The golden tongues of Oxyrhynchus are a reminder that the afterlife, for the Egyptians, was not an abstraction. It was a place with rules, a judge, and a strict code of silence — and gold was the tool for breaking it. What a civilization places in its graves reveals what it believed was worth carrying into eternity. For the people of Ptolemaic Oxyrhynchus, that was the ability to speak.

Related: More stories from The Old World and Retainer Sacrifice in Ancient Egypt Is Confirmed by Skulls.