Mummies with golden tongues, and a piece of Homer tucked inside one of them. That’s what archaeologists just pulled out of a Roman-era tomb at Al-Bahnasa in Egypt, the ancient city once called Oxyrhynchus. The mummies were wrapped in linen patterned with geometric designs, and four of them had metal tongues placed in their mouths — three gold, one copper. The idea was that the dead would need them to speak in the afterlife. But the wildest find was paper, not metal. Inside one mummy’s wrappings, the team found a scrap of papyrus carrying a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad — the famous “Catalogue of Ships” that lists every Greek crew sailing to Troy.