Ancient Persian Princess

This mummy was allegedly found after an earthquake near Quettaand, Pakistan. The alleged Persian princess had been put up for sale on the black antiquities market for 600 million Pakistani rupees, the equivalent of US$6 million. On October 19, 2000, Pakistani authorities were alerted. The "sellers" were accused of violating the country's Antiquities Act, a charge which carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

It was started in November 2000, when the international press reported an amazing find: a mummy, which was claimed to be that of an ancient Persian princess, over 2,600 years old. The mummy was encased in a carved stone coffin inside a wooden sarcophagus and was wearing a golden crown and mask. Of course, the Persian princess was immediately hailed as a major archaeological discovery.

The princess was wrapped in ancient Egyptian style. All of the internal organs had been taken out of her body in the same way that the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead. Her cloth-bound body was dressed with golden artifacts, with an inscription on the golden chest plate that read, "I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes, I am Rhodugune." The situation led archaeologists to speculate that she might have been an Egyptian princess married to a Persian prince, or a daughter of Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia. However, mummification had been primarily an Egyptian practice, and mummies had never been found in Persia before.

When the curator from the Karachi National Museum, Dr. Asma Ibrahim, began her investigation into the mummy, a different story began to emerge. There were some strange puzzles about this ancient princess. The inscriptions on the mummy's breastplate had some grammatical errors, and there were peculiarities in the way she had been mummified. Several detailed operations common to Egyptian mummification had been omitted. It began to look like the mummy was not the princess she was supposed to be; perhaps she was a more ordinary ancient mummy dressed up to be a Persian princess by forgers trying to increase her value. So, forensic experts all over the globe analyzed the mummy and her magnificent trappings and discovered that she is an elaborate fake.

Sadly, this mummy had an even darker history. Computerized tomography scans and X-ray photographs of the body inside the mummy revealed that this was no ancient corpse but a woman who had died in the recent past, and that her neck was broken. An autopsy confirmed that this young woman may indeed have been murdered to provide a body for the fakers to mummify, a body that they intended to pass off as an ancient mummy for millions of dollars on the international art black market.