In October 2000 a mummy of an alleged Persian princess surfaced in Baluchistan province of Pakistan. After huge publicity and further investigation, the mummy proved to be an archaeological forgery and possibly a murder victim.
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.
In a press conference on October 26, archaeologist Ahmad Hasan Dani from the Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University announced that the mummy seemed to be a princess dated circa 600 BC.
The mummy was wrapped in Egyptian style and rested in a gilded wooden coffin with cuneiform carvings inside a stone sarcophagus. The coffin had been carved with a large image of Ahura Mazda. 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. Inscription on the golden chest plate claimed that he was relatively unknown Rhodugune , a daughter of king Xerxes.
Archaeologists speculated that she might have been an Egyptian princess married to a Persian prince or a daughter of Karoosh-ul-Kabir of Khamam-ul-Nishiyan dynasty of Persia. However, because mummification had been primarily Egyptian practice, they had not met any mummies in Persia before.
At the same time, governments of Iran and Pakistan begun to argue about the ownership of the mummy. Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization claimed that she was 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. Taliban of Afghanistan also made a claim. People in Quetta demanded that the police should return the mummy to them.
On November 2000, the mummy was placed in display in the National Museum of Pakistan.
In USA, archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella stated that the description of the mummy sounded similar to photographs of a mummy he had seen the previous March. Amanollah Riggi, a middleman working in behalf of an unidentified antiquities dealer in Pakistan had approached him and offered him a mummy. He had claimed that its owners were in Pakistan and a Zoroastrian family 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. She 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 Aga Lhan 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.
In a report on April 17 2001, Ibrahim concluded that the mummy was a body of a modern woman of maybe 21 years of age who had died maybe two years previously and possibly killed with a blunt instrument to the neck. Her teeth had been removed after death and her hip joint, pelvis and backbone damaged. Then the body had been filled with powder. Police begun to investigate possible murder and arrested number of suspects in Baluchistan.
