At the Taposiris Magna Temple in western Alexandria, Egypt, archaeologists discovered 16 burial shafts. In one of those shafts, they discovered a mummy who found a gold foil tongue in its mouth.
This practice of being buried with a “golden tongue” was to ensure that the dead would be able to speak to the court of Osiris in the afterlife in order to decide the deceased’s fate.
Led by Kathleen Martinez of the University of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, she identified two important finds in the mummies. She reported to CNN that one of the mummies “bears gilded decorations showing Osiris, the god of the afterlife, while the other wears a crown decorated with horns and a cobra snake on the forehead.”
Findings of funeral masks and marble masks that date back to the Roman and Greek periods show the importance of preserving one’s soul in the afterlife and ensuring those people get to meet with the Gods in death in order to live a fulfilling and harmonious eternity. These findings also show the amount of great craftsmanship that went into such creations that were going to be buried with the dead rather than be on display for everyone to see. It shows us how important both life and death were to this culture.
Resources:
GREENSBORO COLLEGE ART COLUMN 