/ARTS WEEKLY/PAKISTAN: Mystery of the Persian Mummy Continues

By Zofeen Ebrahim Reprint | | Print |

Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Pakistan, Jul 1 2003 (IPS) - Save for a decent Muslim burial, the ‘mummy’ that created a furore among archaeologists around the world in 2000 when it was discovered in Pakistan, lies in a cold, uneasy slumber, sealed and locked in the mortuary of Edhi Foundation here.

There is something sinister about the way she refuses to go into oblivion.

Even after the treatment meted out to her while she was alive – her back was broken – and later when an autopsy was performed after being mummified, she is still able to churn up quite a rumpus.

Yet the authorities concerned seem least pushed. "Even after a news report in the ‘Dawn’ newspaper (in May), let alone a visit to the mortuary, there has not even been a phone call inquiry from any official quarters today," said Rizwan Edhi of the Edhi Foundation.

”It’s been two years since the mummy was given to us by the National Museum, Karachi, for safekeeping. But it seems they have forgotten about it completely,” said Anwar Kazmi, spokesman of the foundation.

”During this time, we reminded them twice but there has been no response from their side. We should be given permission to bury it and be paid for its storage or they should take it away," said Kazmi, who adds that the morgue charges 300 rupees (5.17 U.S. dollars) per day for keeping the body in cold storage.

But the director general of archaeology and museums of the government of Pakistan, Saleem-ul-Haq, says, "It is not our responsibility. When it was proven that it was a fake and was being sold as an antiquity, it became a police case.”

He adds that the confusion that has arisen as to who is the rightful owner remains because the police in Balochistan province wanted to register the case in Sindh since it was taken to the capital of that province, Karachi. But the Sindh police wanted it registered in Quetta in north-western Pakistan, where it was first discovered.

As for the police, there was no complaint lodged or registered from any quarters of a missing person.

"The person who had bought the mummy goes about free too as he’s too influential to be put behind bars," said Dr Asma Ibrahim, the young woman who took the initiative to have it investigated. "In fact, he tells everyone that his mummy is not a fake and that I’m lying," she grinned, without identifying the buyer.

While the heated tussle goes on, Edhi Foundation is resigned to keep the dead body cool.

"Whoever is responsible should realise that ours is a charitable organisation and we have limited space. Last year we kept some 6,200 dead bodies. We have only ten people working in the mortuary,” said Kazmi.

”After three days we give them a proper burial. Keeping the body like this in cold storage is against the sanctity of the dead, one should realise this," Rizwan added.

But exclaimed Dr Asma Ibrahim, the curator of the National Museum then: "It was not a mummy when it was handed over to the Edhi mortuary. It was just a dead body of a woman."

As such no one is interested to claim her. While she was a mummy, she was a valuable asset and fetched a handsome price, now without the casket, coffin or even bandages, she is just another dead body.

What happens if there are no claims? "I guess she will remain in our storage and occupy space," said Rizwan resignedly.

The story of the supposedly ancient mummy began in October 2000, when following a tip, the police raided a house in a small border town of Balochistan, close to the Iran-Afghanistan border. They discovered what was then reported as one of the "most dramatic archaeological finds in recent memory – a magnificent mummy adorned in gold and believed to be 2,500 years old”.

It was so intriguing that it led the British Broadcasting Corp’s ‘Horizon’ programme to fly to Pakistan to piece the puzzle together in the form of a documentary – ‘The Mystery of the Persian Mummy’.

On discovering the mummy in a stone coffin inside a carved wooden sarcophagus, the police arrested an Iranian trying to sell it for a fortune on the antiquities black market. He claimed the mummy was discovered when an earthquake disturbed an archaeological site in the desert.

The Karachi police followed the trail of the wooden box to a house of a local tribal chief, Sardar Wali Reki, in Quetta. The mummy was then transported to the National Museum in Karachi. When the coffin was opened and the stone removed, the tiny mummy – all of four feet, seven inches was covered in a resin-impregnated cloth.

"I had always wanted to work on the mummies.now was my chance, it was like a dream come true for me," Ibrahim said in the film. "Eminent archaeologists from all over the world were calling us up," she recalled.

Ibrahim began the difficult process of deciphering the cuneiform script of ancient Iran on the breast plate and the wooden coffin, and upon initial reading found that it proclaimed her to be Rhodugune, a Persian princess from Persepolis.

At this point, the story takes a turn that all is not well. "There were grammatical errors and the language used was not from the period the inscriptions said it was,” she says.

She sent the script and her comments to three epigraphists of international acclaim and after careful perusal they endorsed her claim. Professor Nicholas Sims-WILLIAMS of University of London, one of the experts, said, "There’s no way that an old Persian king would have had the name of his daughter inscribed in Greek form."

Ibrahim recalled that once her initial euphoria wore off and she looked at the fungus-laden mummy and the carvings on the coffin more closely, "it became crystal clear that it was a fake. I even found pencil drawings beneath the rosettes."

Kaleem Lashari, director of Sindh Archives and an archaeologist, said: ”It was quite obvious. But what was not known was whether the mummy inside the bandage was a fake or not.”

To find out if she had been mummified in the Egyptian way, the mummy was taken for X-rays to the Aga Khan University and later put through a CT scan.

This showed there were no internal organs, not even the heart as it was believed that "the heart had to stay in the body because when you go to the next world you’d have to be able to think and you’d have to be able to speak to say the magic spells that were going to reassemble your body," said Bob Brier, an Egyptologist from Long Island who was sent these reports. "The Pakistan mummy is less skillfully done" was his verdict.

The experts’ disturbing conclusion was that the body was not old.

Probably the old woman had died recently and was embalmed and mummified. But whoever did it had a fair knowledge of human anatomy, embalming techniques, cuneiform script and history.

It definitely could not have been one man – so complex were the processes of fraud. It seemed the ghastly forgery had been performed by a team and masterminded by a well-read archaeologist. The BBC documentary gives its verdict that the "forgery was most likely to have been done in Iran."

But the hair-raising question remains unresolved: Who was the woman inside the mummy? "Her spine was broken so it was either an accidental death or the woman was murdered,” Lashari added. According to forensic evidence from the bone and tissue carbon testing, the woman died in 1996.