Check out this recently discovered mummy with a gold-foil tongue — It’s about 2,000 years old and comes from the Ancient Egyptian city of Taposiris Magna. Scholars believe the special tongue was to be able to speak in the afterlife — maybe to answer to Osiris, the divine judge of the dead.
News of this discovery emerged just this past February, which was also an important month in another Ancient Egyptian story about the afterlife. Sofie Schiødt, doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen, finished her translation of a newly discovered manual about the process of mummification. It’s the most detailed writing from Ancient Egypt on the subject — among the newest bits of information are details about how to preserve the face of a dead person. It involved using aromatic resins (the Egyptians were big into smells) and chemicals to keep bacteria from earing away at the skin.
This post would have done well around Halloween, but Febrary — the month of these discoveries — happened to be the time of the Ancient Roman feast day of the dead (Parentalia ). So it works.
Source(s): University of Copenhagen, Facility if the Humanities, @phys.org, citing the work of Sophie Schiødt. Smithsonian Magazine, Isis Davis-marks, Feb 3, 2021, “Archaeologists in Egypt Discover Mummy with Gold Tongue.”
