Modern Mummy Mystery
InScight (28/06/2001)
Last October, police in Pakistan seized an ornately carved mummy coffin on offer to art
dealers for $11 million. A golden plaque on the coffin included an Old Persian cuneiform
inscription suggesting that wrapped inside were the 2600-year-old remains of a daughter of
King Xerxes. But like a pulp-fiction mummy unraveling in front of horrified onlookers, the
exalted Persian princess's pedigree has fallen to pieces. The female mummy now appears to
have been a relatively recent murder victim or else a body snatched from a grave shortly
after death--two grisly scenarios that have scientists digging for clues to her true
identity.
Soon after the discovery, archaeologists became dubious about the breastplate inscription,
which bore a few textual mistakes. They also looked askance at the preparation of the
mummy, which was not fully desiccated. Further inspections and computed tomography scans
of the body, now in a Karachi mortuary, showed that the woman's back was broken and that
her mouth and stomach were "full of a powder," samples of which are now being
analyzed, says curator Asma Ibrahim of the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi.
Ibrahim sent samples from the coffin, the matting under the mummy, and the bandages and
resins to Pakistani experts and to the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin for
analyses. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission's laboratory agreed to stray outside its
bailiwick to radiocarbon date some of the materials. In April, Ibrahim issued a report
finding that the materials were of recent origin and concluding that the mummy is a fake.
Ibrahim says that recent tomography scans and other analyses indicate that the body--whose
bones show signs of osteoporosis--is that of a woman older than 50 who died probably
within the past 5 or 6 years.
However, to chase Ibrahim's hunch that the mummy is a murder victim or was dug up by grave
robbers shortly after it was interred, Pakistani detectives would need a better idea of
the time and place of death. The detective assignment is being taken on by physicist
Gerhard Morgenroth, who says his lab at the Friedrich Alexander University of
Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, is working "to give as exact a time frame as
possible" for the woman's death. Meanwhile, Ibrahim fears that a ring of mummy-fakers
may try to produce and sell similarly false artifacts.
If there's a lesson to be learned, Ibrahim says, it's that it pays to scratch below the
surface of any archaeological claim. "The wooden coffin was beautiful and very
convincing, so the flaws were not obvious at first," she says.
END OF REPORT
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