Egyptians Buried Their Dead With Gold Tongues as Legal Briefs for the Afterlife

To prepare their loved ones for the afterlife, ancient Egyptians sometimes placed tongue-shaped pieces of gold foil in the mouths of the deceased. Archaeologists just found about two dozen of them, and the logic behind the practice is stranger and more specific than you might expect.

Eighteen ancient Egyptian tombs were uncovered near the Mediterranean coast, yielding 24 gold tongues among the funerary objects buried with the dead. The tombs were found in the ancient town of Marina el-Alamein, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Alexandria. Prized as the "flesh of the gods," gold was believed to lend the dead a voice as they prepared to face the judgment of Osiris, who could grant entry to the afterlife or condemn a soul to eternal darkness.

The cosmological logic is rooted in the Egyptian concept of the afterlife as a legal proceeding. The Book of the Dead contains specific spells, essentially scripts, the deceased were expected to recite before divine judges. Gold, immune to decay, was the material that guaranteed the voice would hold. Hesham Hussein of Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities described the gold tongues as symbolic funerary amulets, placed so the deceased could speak during divine judgment or recite the sacred formulas required to navigate the afterlife.

The necropolis shows clear signs of both Greek and Egyptian influence, though the burial practices, particularly those involving mummification, follow conventional Egyptian funerary traditions and beliefs about the afterlife. One of the objects is shaped like the Eye of Horus, a symbol associated with healing and protection.

The Book of the Dead is, among other things, a litigation handbook. The gold tongue was the retainer fee.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine, July 15, 2026

Hot Take: A civilization that built pyramids apparently also understood that the afterlife had a discovery process, and prepared accordingly. Lawyers have been billing for this instinct for two thousand years.