Persian Princess

The Persian Princess or Persian Mummy is a mummy of an alleged Persian princess that surfaced in Pakistani Baluchistan in October 2000. After huge publicity and further investigation, the mummy proved to be an archaeological forgery and possibly a murder victim.

Discovery

The mummy was found October 19, 2000. Pakistani authorities received a tip that one Ali Aqbar had videotape that showed he had a mummy for sale. Aqbar led the police to the house of tribal leader Wali Mohammed Reeki in Kharan in Baluchistan near the border of Afghanistan. Reeki told them that he had received it from an Iranian named Sharif Shah Bakhi who had said that he had found it after an earthquake near Quetta. The mummy had been in sale in the black antiquities market for equivalent to $11-30 million. Reeki and Akbar were accused of violating the country's Antiquities Act with a possible ten years in prison.

Identification

In a press conference on October 26, archaeologist Ahmad Hasan Dani of Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University announced that the mummy seemed to be a princess dated circa 600 BC.

The mummy was wrapped in ancient Egyptian style and rested in a gilded wooden coffin with cuneiform carvings inside a stone sarcophagus. The coffin had been carved with a large faravahar image. The mummy was atop a layer of mixture of wax and honey and was covered by a stone slab and it had a golden crown on its brow. An inscription on the golden chest plate claimed that she was the relatively unknown Rhodugune, a daughter of king Xerxes I of Persia and a member of the Achaemenid dynasty.

Archaeologists speculated that she might have been an Egyptian princess married to a Persian prince or a daughter of Cyrus the Great of Achaemenid dynasty of Persia. However, because mummification had been primarily Egyptian practice, they had not met any mummies in Persia before.

Ownership

The governments of Iran and Pakistan soon began to argue about the ownership of the mummy. The Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization claimed her as a member of Persian royal family and demanded the mummy's return. Pakistan's Archaeological Department HQ said that it belonged to Pakistan because it had been found in Baluchistan. The Taliban of Afghanistan also made a claim. People in Quetta demanded that the police should return the mummy to them.

In November 2000, the mummy was placed in display in the National Museum of Pakistan.

Doubts

News of the Persian Princess prompted American archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella to come out about an incident the previous March when he was shown photographs of a similar mummy. Amanollah Riggi, a middleman working in behalf of an unidentified antiquities dealer in Pakistan, had approached him, claiming its owners were a Zoroastrian family who had brought it to the country. The seller had claimed that was a daughter of Xerxes, based on translation of the cuneiform of the breastplate.

The cuneiform text on the breastplate contained a passage from the Behistun inscription in western Iran. Behistun inscription was carved during a reign of Darius, a later king. When the dealer's representative had sent a piece of a coffin to be carbon dated, analysis had shown that the coffin was only maybe 250 years old. Muscarella had suspected a forgery and severed contact. He had informed Interpol through the FBI.

When Pakistani professor Ahmad Dani, director of the Institute of Asian Civilizations in Islamabad, studied the coffin he realized it was not as old as the body. The mat below the body was maybe five years old. He contacted Asma Ibrahim, the curator of the Pakistani National Museum in Karachi, who investigated further. During the investigation, Iran and Taliban repeated their demands. Taliban claimed that they had apprehended the smugglers that had taken the mummy out of Afghanistan.

The inscriptions on the breastplate were not in proper grammatical Persian. Instead of a Persian form the daughter's name, "Wardegauna", forgers had used a Greek version "Rhodugune". CAT and X-ray scans in Agha Khan Hospital indicated that the mummification had not been made following ancient Egyptian custom - many internal organs were removed but the brain was still inside the skull, for example. Tendons that would have decayed over centuries were still intact.

Fate

Ibrahim concluded in an April 17 2001 report that the Persian Princess was in fact a modern woman of about 21 who had died maybe two years previously, possibly killed with a blunt instrument to the neck. Her teeth had been removed after death and her hip joint, pelvis and backbone damaged, before the body had been filled with powder. Police began to investigate a possible murder and arrested a number of suspects in Baluchistan.

The Edhi Foundation took custody of the body, and on August 5 2005 announced that it was to be interred with proper burial rites. As of 2008, however, the body still remains unburied due to bureaucratic delays.

External links

* [http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/IARC/cwoc/issue9/mummy.htm The Mystery of the Persian Mummy]
* [http://www.archaeology.org/0101/etc/persia.html Special Report: Saga of the Persian Princess From Archaeology.org]
* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/persianmummytrans.shtml BBC Program's Transcript Of The Mystery of the Persian Mummy]
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4749861.stm BBC News about the burial plans]
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7206526.stm BBC News - Fake 'mummy' still awaits burial]