What we put inside the dead

On Monday the University of Barcelona announced that one of the mummies their team had excavated last winter at Al Bahnasa — the old Oxyrhynchus, 190 km south of Cairo — was carrying a papyrus of the Iliad on its abdomen. Not a spell, not a protective formula, but a fragment of Book II: the Catalogue of Ships. The team claims this is the first Greek literary text known to have been deliberately incorporated into a mummification.¹ That is a strong claim. A register is a good way to test one.

What follows are five specific objects that were placed on or within a body at interment, by human intent, arranged roughly in time. I have been strict about the rule. Amulets worn in life do not count unless they travelled into the grave still on the wearer. Objects on a pyre are a different category. The question under the register is modest: why, in that last moment, does someone reach for an object — and why a text, and why this text?

A heart scarab. Serpentinite, gold-mounted, placed over the heart of a woman named Hatnefer inside her wrappings around 1480 BCE. Excavated in 1936 by the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian Expedition beneath the forecourt of her son Senenmut's tomb at Thebes; Met accession 36.3.2. The flat underside carries a version of Chapter 30A of the Book of the Dead — the heart-scarab spell. In it Hatnefer addresses her own heart in the first person and orders it not to testify against her during the weighing. The body is being argued with. The Met notes that her name was engraved over erased earlier text: the scarab was not made for her first, and nobody seems to have minded.

Two silver scrolls. Rolled small, inscribed in Paleo-Hebrew with a variant of the Priestly Blessing — the same lines later preserved in Numbers 6:24–26 — and found in 1979 in Chamber 25 of a Judahite burial cave at Ketef Hinnom, southwest of Jerusalem. Dated to around 600 BCE. Probably worn at the neck in life and, crucially, interred that way. Four centuries older than anything in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The text addresses the wearer. It is a text of protection.

A gold tongue. Flat gold foil, cut into a tongue shape and slid into the mouth of the deceased. Attested at several Late Period and Roman-era sites in Egypt, including Al Bahnasa in the 2021 and 2022 University of Barcelona seasons and Taposiris Magna, west of Alexandria, in early 2021.² The working interpretation is functional: the foil lets the dead speak before Osiris in the final judgement. The scarab silences the heart; the tongue loosens it. A small, expensive mechanism.

A curse tablet. Rolled lead, inscribed in Latin and Gaulish, addressed to Mars Rigisamu — Mars the Royal — and placed between the legs of a man in Grave F2199 of a Gallo-Roman cemetery under the Porte Madeleine Hospital in Orléans. Excavated in 2022; one of twenty-one defixiones recovered from the site. The dead man is not the object of the curse. He is the messenger, chosen for his proximity to infernal deities. Of all the entries, this is the one in which the body is most clearly an instrument.

A papyrus of the Iliad. Bundled, sealed, laid on the abdomen of a Roman-era mummy in Tomb 65, Sector 22 at Al Bahnasa, announced 20 April 2026. Preserves lines from Book II — the Catalogue of Ships. The "first literary text" claim earns a small asterisk: the Derveni papyrus, an Orphic commentary found carbonised in a Macedonian nobleman's funeral pyre in 1962, is older and also literary, but it sat on the pyre rather than on the body, and so fails this register's rule. Narrowed to on-or-within, the Barcelona claim holds. A list of who sailed where, placed inside a person who was sailing somewhere. The editorial instinct behind the choice is not subtle, but it may well be Roman.

Reading end to end, a rough shape appears. Some of these objects protect the dead, some send them, and some use them. The scarab argues with the body; the blessing covers it; the tongue enables it; the curse tablet conscripts it; the Iliad manifest, most peculiarly, accompanies it — the way one might slip a letter of introduction into a traveller's coat. In each case someone decided that a certain sentence had to go on or inside a body rather than anywhere else. A commonplace book is, formally, the same gesture, minus the body.