Archeologists Find 'Gold Tongues' and a Piece of the Trojan War in the Egyptian Desert
We've got some exciting news out of Egypt. LBV Magazine reports that a Spanish archeological team from the University of Barcelona and the Institute of the Ancient Near East unearthed astonishing discoveries at the Oxyrhynchus site during their latest excavation campaign.
Located in the Minya Governorate, the archeologists conducted their work in the eastern sector of a Ptolemaic tomb categorized as number 67. After examining its various chambers, the team also excavated an underground funerary chamber, where they found three gold tongues near the mummies therein. There's also "a fourth piece made of copper."
These artifacts were buried with the deceased to ensure they could communicate with Osiris, the god of the afterlife. The specialists also noted that the "additional application of thin gold sheets on the surface" of some of the mummies indicates that they were wealthy.
Along with the gold tongues, the team discovered something exceptionally rare – papyrus located inside one of the mummies. It was a document containing a textual fragment from Book 2 of Homer's Iliad, specifically the "Catalogue of Ships" passage. This passage lists the contingents of the Achaean army that sailed to Troy during the Trojan War.
Everything recovered during the expedition must undergo "required conservation processes, laboratory analyses, and photogrammetric documentation." Then, they'll be transported to the storage facilities of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The study of Homer's text could provide context regarding the Hellenization, or the spread of Greek culture among non-Greek people, in Oxyrhynchus (modern-day Al-Bahnasa) during Roman rule.
The team concluded that these discoveries denote "a hybrid funerary panorama" that showcases how Greek customs and Roman imperialism transformed Egyptian traditions. Centuries later, Oxyrhynchus is an important archeological site known the world over for its extensive collection of papyrus texts.