A golden tongue would not have been uncommon in elite burials during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, said Lorelei H. Corcoran, the director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of Memphis.
“Within an Egyptian funerary context, its reference is to Spell 158 of the Book of the Dead, which ensures that the deceased has the ability to breathe and speak, as well as to eat and drink, in the afterlife,” Dr. Corcoran added. “It may be conflated with the Greek funerary practice of placing a coin on or in the mouth of the deceased as payment for the ferryman, Charon, who transported the deceased across the River Styx to the Underworld.”
The team of archaeologists that found the 16 tombs at Taposiris Magna was led by Kathleen Martinez, a lawyer-turned-amateur-archaeologist from the Dominican Republic. The team has been working for years to find Cleopatra’s tomb, and had focused their efforts on Taposiris Magna.
But the burial site of the famous queen, who reigned from Alexandria and was said to have died there, has not turned up there yet.
“The stated goal of the Egyptian-Dominican mission is to find the burial of Cleopatra at Taposiris Magna,” Dr. Corcoran said. “Many scholars believe, however, that the burial place of Cleopatra was within a royal burial complex, perhaps associated with the palace district, now lost underwater in the Alexandria harbor.”
Representatives of the Egyptian tourism ministry did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the 16 burial tombs at Taposiris Magna. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that two golden tongues were found there and would be studied at the Alexandria National Museum before being put on display in museums across Egypt.
The latest discovery comes as Egypt is making a concerted effort to draw visitors to the country, which depends heavily on tourism. In recent years, archaeologists have unearthed more than 100 delicately painted wooden coffins at the ancient burial ground of Saqqara, a 4,400-year-old tomb with rare wall paintings near Cairo, and remnants of a colossal Pharaonic statue in the working-class neighborhood of Matariya.
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