Archaeologists have discovered 18 ancient tombs in an Egyptian town along the Mediterranean Sea.

The tombs ‪—‬ which were unearthed in Marina el-Alamein (also spelled Alamin), about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Alexandria ‪—‬ date to the Ptolemaic (322 to 30 B.C.) or Roman (30 B.C. to A.D. 395) period, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a translated statement announcing the find.

During the Ptolemaic period, Egypt was ruled by the descendants of one of Alexander the Great's generals, while the Roman period started with the death of Cleopatra VII, when Egypt became incorporated into the Roman Empire as a province.

The team noted that 11 of the tombs had been carved deep into the ground, while the seven others were located closer to the ground's surface. The tombs held many artifacts ‪—‬ most notably, 24 "gold tongues" that were likely put into the mouths of mummies, and an offering altar with a base designed to look like a false door.

"The false door is one of the oldest and most recognizable elements of ancient Egyptian funerary architecture. In traditional Egyptian belief, it symbolized the interface between the worlds of the living and the dead, through which the deceased could spiritually receive offerings presented by the living," Hesham Hussein, the undersecretary for Lower Egypt and Sinai archaeology at Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, told Live Science in an email.

The fact that the design of a false door was carved into the altar "suggests that the symbolic meaning of the false door remained important even as its architectural function evolved," Hussein added.

Gold tongues from ancient Egypt

Gold tongues have been found in mummies at a number of ancient Egyptian sites. The ancient Egyptians considered gold to be the flesh of the gods, and they believed gold tongues could help the deceased communicate with them in the afterlife.

"Gold tongues are a well-documented feature of some burials dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in Egypt," Hussein said. "They are generally interpreted as symbolic funerary amulets intended to enable the deceased to speak in the afterlife, particularly during the judgment before Osiris, or more broadly to communicate and recite sacred formulas in the next world."

Interestingly, one of the newly found gold tongues is shaped like the "Eye of Horus." Horus was a falcon-headed god associated with the sky and warfare. Artifacts shaped like his eye are often found in Egypt and were used to ward off evil, according to the statement.

However, it's unclear if some of these artifacts are actually gold tongues, Attilio Mastrocinque, a retired archaeology professor formerly at the University of Verona in Italy, told Live Science. Mastrocinque has written extensively about Greek and Roman religion but was not involved in this excavation.

After looking at the photos posted by the ministry, he noted that one appears to show a wheat ear. Wheat ears were associated with fertility and images of them were popular in the ancient world. The newfound artifact looks similar to silver wheat ears that have been found in Roman sanctuaries in Europe, Mastrocinque added.

Altar with a false door?

False doors are commonly found in ancient Egyptian tombs and offering altars are often near these doors. In this case, the base of an offering altar resembles a false door.

Krzysztof Jakubiak, an archaeology professor at the University of Warsaw who has excavated at Marina el-Alamein in the past but was not involved in the recent excavation, noted that this find likely needs additional analysis.

"I would exercise caution in asserting a direct comparison between the iconographic motifs visible on the discovered altar and those of the false door iconography," Jakubiak told Live Science in an email. He said it's possible that the altar was not finished and its existing appearance simply resembles a false door.

Hala Mostafa, an archaeology professor at Ain Shams University said in an email that he thought the altar may depict the hieroglyphic sign for "offering" rather than a false door.

Goddess statue and other finds

One of the tombs contained an 8.2-foot-long (2.5 meters) granite coffin whose lid was still on when the tomb was discovered. The team is currently examining the skeletal remains found inside.

Other finds included an incomplete statue of Aphrodite, a Greek goddess associated with love and beauty. During ancient Egypt's Ptolemaic dynasty, Greek culture and religion became increasingly popular in Egypt. Mastrocinque said it will be interesting to see if there is a structure for Aphrodite near the statue

"It is important to know where this statue has been found," Mastrocinque told Live Science in an email. "Was there a little cultic place of Aphrodite within this funerary complex?"

Dorota Dzierzbicka, director of the Polish-Egyptian Archaeological Mission to Marina el-Alamein, said that the new finds, along with finds made at the site in the past, reveal that the town was "a culturally diverse community in which Egyptian and Graeco-Roman traditions coexisted and blended in everyday life and funerary practices." She noted that the new discoveries were made by Egyptian archaeologists who work at the site.

See how much you know about mummies with our mummy quiz!

In most areas of archaeology, excavators painstakingly dig layer by layer to reveal not just buried artifacts but also charred seeds, broken bones and microscopic grains of ancient pollen. This delicate process is followed by months of intensive lab work to study the newfound remains. But there is one kind of archaeologist that takes a different approach to understanding the past. Experimental archaeologists replicate how people did things in the past, using techniques they recreate from archaeological information and modern knowledge.

In his new book, "Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025), science writer Sam Kean explores the experimental side of archaeology. Through a series of ancient and modern vignettes, Kean discovers how Stone Age city dwellers kept their houses cool 9,000 years ago, how the Romans used needle and thread to style hair, and how bog bodies were formed in Iron Age Europe.

In this excerpt, Kean meets two men who used ancient techniques to diligently mummify a human body in an effort to understand how ancient Egyptians took care of their dead.

Related: Read our interview with Sam Kean on 'Dinner with King Tut'

Cultures throughout history have mummified their dead, and a handful still do today, but Egyptian mummies remain the most iconic. Unfortunately, the Egyptians wrote down virtually nothing about their embalming process. This leaves experimental archaeology as one of the few avenues available for understanding mummification, and several practitioners have indeed re-created mummies in modern times. In most cases, they work with animals, but a few intrepid souls have mummified human beings, most famously when Bob Brier and Ronn Wade did so in 1994.

Wade grew up wanting to be a mortician like his father. After a stint as a medic in the Vietnam War, he became an anatomist and eventually the head of Maryland's state anatomy board. Brier also has training in anatomy, but is an Egyptologist by training and passion. He's accumulated so many books on Egypt over his life that he rents a second apartment just to accommodate them. Brier and Wade selected their mummy from the pool of people in Baltimore who donated their bodies to science. Ultimately, they settled on a seventy-six-year-old Caucasian man who died of a heart attack. His identity remains secret, but a bit crassly, Wade nicknamed him E. M. Balm.

For authenticity's sake, Brier and Wade used replicas of pharaonic-era tools and materials, including linen wraps, an oddly wide wooden embalming table, and copper and obsidian blades — although they quickly abandoned the copper ones, which couldn't cut flesh well. Before starting on their mummy, they practiced one important step on other cadavers: extracting the brain. Instead of using full cadavers for this, they obtained some decapitated heads leftover from a medical school's plastic surgery class. ("They were looking a little weird," Brier recalls. "They'd had facelifts and such.")

From some scant references, Brier knew that Egyptian embalmers removed the brain by inserting a hooked rod through the nostrils, but the details were vague. Brier and Wade first tried scooping the brain out with such a rod, but the tissue proved too soft and wouldn't come out. They finally took to squirting water up the cadaver's nose, then used the rod to whisk the brain into a slurry. After that, it poured right out. "Like a milkshake," Brier says. "A strawberry milkshake to be exact."

Skills honed, the duo began making their mummy in May 1994. The first step involved removing his organs.

Different organs met different fates in Egypt. Unclear about the purpose of the brain, embalmers typically threw it away. The heart, in contrast, was left in situ [in place]; it was considered the seat of all thinking, emotion, and intelligence. Abdominal organs were carefully extracted and preserved. Following this protocol, Brier and Wade made a 3½-inch [9 centimeters] incision in their cadaver's abdomen and removed the spleen, liver, gallbladder, lungs, and twenty-two feet [6.7 meters] of intestines. Given their size, extracting the liver and lungs required some creative geometry and determined squeezing. The most difficult part involved detaching the lungs from the heart while working blind inside such a tiny hole.

With the organs removed, the pair cleaned the abdomen with palm wine and myrrh, then stuffed frankincense into the skull. This was an important ritual step to prepare the body for the afterlife, and also helped kill microbes and mask bad smells. Ancient embalmers used other sacred substances as well, often imported from Europe and Asia at great cost — pistachio resin, beeswax, castor oil. Ramses the Great's mummy had peppercorns from India shoved up his nose.

Next, Brier and Wade dehydrated the body using natron, a mineral of equal parts salt and baking soda that forms naturally in Egyptian wadis, or dry gullies. Like a sponge, natron sucks the moisture out of flesh, leaving it too dry to support bacteria, maggots, beetles, and other putrefying agents; the leftover tissue is essentially jerky. (Fully committed to authenticity, Brier dug the natron himself in Egypt, and recalls that sneaking hundreds of pounds of unidentified white powder through customs at JFK Airport was one of the more ticklish aspects of the project. Luckily, he was traveling with a film crew, and could hide the powder in suitcases amid their equipment.)

In their lab, Brier and Wade placed the mummy's spleen, lungs, liver, and intestines into bowls and covered them with natron. They also packed 29 linen bags of the powder into the body's empty torso, laid the body on top of 211 more pounds [96 kilograms], and dumped 583 additional pounds [264 kg] over it. They kept the body in Wade's old office, with the heat cranked up to 104 degrees F [Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius] and dehumidifiers running night and day to simulate Egyptian air.

Over the next five weeks, the natron on top turned crusty and brown from absorbing bodily juices, forcing Brier and Wade to crack through it with an iron rod. (Today Brier remembers the odor as acrid but not unpleasant, although news reports at the time say he and Wade donned surgical masks against the smell.) Regardless, the sight of the body beneath thrilled Brier. As it dries, the skin of mummies tightens and shrivels, especially on the face and scalp. The lips retract to reveal the teeth, and skin with less melanin turns brown-yellow. Brier always wondered whether those changes resulted from the immediate mummification process, or from several thousand years of weathering in Egypt's arid climate. One glance at his mummy and Brier knew the answer: even after five weeks, "he looked just like Ramses the Great," he recalls, with leathery skin, a beaky nose, and wispy hair sticking up. The embalming process, not time, made the iconic mummies we know today.

Beyond changing the body's appearance, the dehydration process left the limbs as stiff as tree branches, and dropped its weight from 188 pounds [85 kg] to just 79 [36 kg]. (Thirty-one pounds [14 kg] of that represented the removal of organs.) The organs drying in the bowls withered as well, which helped explain another mystery of Egyptian mummification: as other archaeologists have noted, embalmers typically placed the organs in so‑called canopic jars, funerary vessels with slim necks — so slim that it seemed impossible to fit the larger organs inside. But the natron shrunk them down enough to slip right in.

After removing him from the natron, Brier and Wade gave Mr. Balm a full body massage with lotus, cedar, and palm oils, another step that, while important ritualistically, also had pragmatic benefits — restoring flexibility to the joints, making the mummy easier to handle. This accomplished, they wrapped the body in linen bandages. (Embalmers in ancient times started with the hands and feet, wrapping each digit separately, then proceeded to the arms, legs, and torso. The penis was individually wrapped as well — or, if embarrassingly shriveled, a cod‑piece of stiff linen was bound in place.) At this point, they let the mummy dry for three more months in the arid office, which dropped its weight to 51 pounds [23 kg]. Afterward, they added several more layers of wrappings. In between the layers, they slipped magic amulets and scraps of papyrus with spells on them, a common practice in ancient times.

For the past three decades, the mummy has been lying in a metal casket in Maryland, stored at room temperature. Brier and Wade have partially unwrapped it twice to check for rot, but found nothing amiss. "He's dead and well," says Brier.

See how much you know about mummies with our mummy quiz!