It’s October, 2000, Karachi Police receive a tip that a man named Ali Aqbar (Akbar in some sources) has a video tape showing a mummy. Aqbar is attempting to sell the mummy for Rs600 million (~$11 million USD at the time). Suspecting a violation of Pakistan’s 1975
Antiquities Act, Karachi Police raid Aqbar’s home where they find a copy of said video tape. Aqbar quickly cracks under police questioning and admits he is brokering the mummy for Wali Mohammad Reeki, a camel breeder and Baloch tribal leader. Pakistani authorities raid Reeki’s home in Quetta, the Balochistani capital, where they find the mummy. Reeki also immediately cracks and implicates one Sharif Shah Bakhi. According to Reeki, Bakhi is an Iranian national who was in Kharan, a Balochistani town south of the Afghan border, for some reason during the aftermath of an earthquake. Bakhi found that the earthquake had exposed a tomb on the outskirts of the town from which he had taken the mummy. Bakhi was never located, nor confirmed to exist, and police seem to have failed to extract further details from Aqbar and Reeki. Both men are charged with violating the
Antiquities Act and reportedly would face 10 years in prison. No updates on the legal proceedings would ever be reported.
The 4’7” (~140 cm) evidently female mummy is inside a stone sarcophagus lying upon a reed mat. The mummy is both bandaged in the Ancient Egyptian fashion and covered in a mixture of wax and honey. Placed upon the wax coating are a gold leaf crown, mask, chest plate, and stylised tree. The chest plate is inscribed in the Old Persian cuneiform script. The stone sarcophagus is contained within a wooden box or coffin. The coffin in inscribed with more Old Persian cuneiform and symbols common in the Zoroastrian faith. The mummy is sent to the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi where samples are taken for analysis and is put on display in November, 2000.
Quaid-i-Azam University’s Ahmad Hasan Dani, one of the foremost and most esteemed scholars on Central Asian history and archaeology on the planet, immediately declares that the mummy is a 2,600 year old Achaemenid princess as the chest plate reads “I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes, Mazereka protect me, I am Rhodugune, I am.” Though Dani does admit that there is not a single known example of mummification being practised by Persians, he speculates that the mummy might have been an Egyptian princess who married a Persian king or prince and was buried in the fashion of her people. Asma Ibrahim, a former student of Dani’s, leads the investigation for the National Museum of Pakistan.
This is a major archaeological find. There have never been tombs or burial grounds located near the Achaemenid capital Persepolis. No remains of the Achaemenid dynasty members have ever been found. This is possibly because they practised “sky burials,” which is to say, fed their dead to vultures as is a common practice amongst Zoroastrians.
The Government of Iran immediately demands the return of the mummy. The Taliban Government of Afghanistan also demand that they be given the mummy claiming that they detained a group of unspecified smugglers who admitted that they had smuggled the mummy out of Afghanistan. They’re largely ignored. The tribal peoples of Balochistan also demand the return of the mummy, but they’re completely ignored.
The journal
Archaeology spoke with Oscar White Muscarella of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Muscarella reported that he had been approached by a man living in New Jersey the previous March with photographs of the mummy. The man claimed he represented a Pakistani antiquities dealer who obtained the mummy from a Zoroastrian family that had migrated to Pakistan. The man claimed an American expert had verified it was real. Muscarella contacted the expert who told him that it was a forgery. The rational behind this was that the inscription on the chest plate was grammatically inconsistent with Persian spoken at the time of Xerxes, the inscriptions on the coffin was copied from the Behistun inscription, and Rhodugune is the later Greek version the name. The Achaemenid Persians wrote it as Wardegauna. Muscarella declined to purchase the mummy.
Archaeology reports this to the FBI and publishes a story on it in February.
With testing ordered by Ibrahim underway, Iran sends a delegation of experts from its Cultural Heritage Organization (CHO) to Karachi in January, 2001 to view the mummy and begin negotiations for its return. By January 11th, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reports on CHO’s findings; the mummy is a forgery. Though CT scans and x-rays confirm that the mummy does indeed contain the body of a woman in her early 20s, CHO’s medical experts note the woman appears to have only been mummified for two years, and that the body is actively rotting despite Pakistani efforts to hamper this. Their linguistics experts immediately know it is a hoax citing the same reasons as the formerly mentioned American expert. Additionally, their chemical analysis shows modern petrochemicals and detergents on the body and there are still visible pencil outlines around the inscriptions in the wooden coffin. The CHO delegation returns to Iran, but still demands that the mummy be given to Iran. Dani concedes that the Iranian experts are correct.
In April, 2001, Ibrahim publishes an 11-page report declaring the mummy a fraud for all the reasons previously cited, discrepancies between the mummification methods used and genuine Egyptian methods, the presence of tendons in the body which have long disintegrated in real mummies, and radiocarbon dating results. The report concludes that the woman died in 1996. She suffered massive blunt force trauma to her lower back and pelvis consistent with being hit by a car, and had a broken neck though the broken neck may be a postmortem injury. Ibrahim fears the woman was a murder victim. Pakistani police agencies open an investigation but find nothing.
During the summer of 2005, the Pakistani charity the Edhi Foundation pays to have the body buried with Islamic funerary rites.
The fates of Aqbar and Reeki remain unknown. The existence of Bakhi remains unconfirmed. The circumstances under which the body was obtained and mummified remain unknown. The woman’s identity and the circumstances of her death remain unknown.
Not ready to tackle the big one yet and the Canadian case I was planning to cover is pretty scant on details once you weed out the BS, so I did something a little different.
