A bunch of ancient Egyptian cemeteries unearthed along the Mediterranean coast have given latest insight into the traditional culture – with artefacts found at the location including golden tongues and coffins.
The excavations at Marina el-Alamein, a site 60 miles west of ancient Egyptian capital Alexandria, revealed about two dozen ‘tongues’, which were customary to position into the mouths of some deceased on the time.
It was thought that they might help the dead communicate within the afterlife.
A press release released by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities explained that one in every of the objects found is formed just like the Eye Of Horus — a logo which is usually related to healing.
‘Gold tongues are a well-documented feature of some burials dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in Egypt,’ Hesham Hussein, undersecretary for Lower Egypt and Sinai archaeology, told Live Science.
‘They’re generally interpreted as symbolic funerary amulets intended to enable the deceased…to speak and recite sacred formulas in thenext world.’
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Golden tongues have also been found in recent times within the Taposiris Magna temple, near Alexandria, and the traditional city of Oxyrhynchusm about 200 miles south-east of the present discovery.
In accordance with Smithsonian magazine the practice of placing a golden tongue in a dead person’s mouth comes from spell 158 within the Egyptian Book of The Dead which asks for a ‘golden collar…to be set on the throat of the deceased on the day of internment.’
Many of the tombs unearthed in the most recent find were in an ‘exceptional’ state of preservation, having been kept closed by stone slabs since they were built.
Experts have said they were likely a part of the traditional city of Leukaspis, mentioned by the Greek geographer Strapo.
Leukapsis, founded by the Greeks within the second century, was a thriving business hub known for its wine, wheat and olive trade.
Nonetheless, it was destroyed in July 365 AD by a large underwater earthquake in Crete.
The tremor – which geologists have estimated had a magnitude of around 8.5 – triggered a tsunami which devastated the southern coast of the Mediterranean, with Alexandria and the Nile Delta also suffering severe damage.
Other items of note in the invention included a water well and surface burials near the newly discovered tombs, which experts say reflects the social diversity of town’s occupants as wealthy elites would traditionally have had deeper burials.
The finds point to Egyptian funeral rituals, in addition to architectural influences, lasting into the Ptolemaic and and Roman eras, based on researchers.
A limestone altar, featuring an incomplete marble statue thought to represent the goddess Aphrodite, had what experts describe as ‘distinctive architecture’ pointing to an ‘imaginary door’ — a gateway between the living and the dead which is a component of Egyptian funeral doctrine.
One other of the cemeteries featured a 2.5 metre granite coffin which contained the stays of a plaster sphinx, while pottery, dishes, camphor and basins were also found at the location of the tombs.
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