Mummies with golden tongues and a papyrus with a fragment of the Iliad inside one of them were found in an Egyptian tomb.

A Spanish archaeological expedition from the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East, led by Maite Mascourt and Esther Pons Mellado, uncovered a Roman necropolis in the Egyptian province of Minya, in the El-Bahnasa area. During the excavations, mummies from the era of Roman rule were found - some of them were wrapped in fabric with geometric patterns, some were placed in painted wooden sarcophagi. In addition, in the mouths of a number of the dead there were three gold and one copper tongue-amulet; traces of the presence of gold foil were recorded on some mummies.

The most unexpected discovery was a papyrus that was buried with one of the mummies: it contains a fragment of the second book of Homer’s Iliad - the so-called “Catalogue of Ships”, which lists the participants in the Greek campaign against Troy. This was announced by the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, Hisham al-Leisy. According to him, the find adds an important literary and historical dimension to the monument, and also allows a new look at the funerary culture of El Bahnasa from the Hellenistic and Roman eras.

To the east of Ptolemaic tomb 67, discovered in 2024, excavations revealed a trench containing three limestone chambers, only partially preserved. The first contained a stone stele, a large ceramic vessel containing the cremated remains of an adult, the bones of a baby and the skull of a cat, all wrapped in cloth. The second chamber contained a similar vessel containing the ashes of two people and the bones of another cat. It is noted that cremation in Egypt of the Roman period is an extremely rare practice against the background of the prevailing mummification.

To the south of this site, archaeologists discovered terracotta and bronze figurines, including figures of the god Harpocrates in the form of a horseman and a small image of Cupid. In tomb 65, in the underground burial chamber, they also found gold and copper amulets, several Roman mummies and colored wooden sarcophagi - however, all of them had already been looted in antiquity.

Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Sharif Fathi called the discovery part of a series of significant finds in Minya province, reflecting the multi-layered nature of Egyptian civilization. El-Bahnasa is the ancient Oxyrhynchus, one of the largest cities of Hellenistic Egypt, famous primarily for its large-scale collections of papyri. This winter, the tomb of Pharaoh Thutmose II was discovered in Egypt for the first time in more than a hundred years.