Mummy Not So Dearest

When Karachi police discovered a gold-bedecked mummy believed to be at least 2,600 years old in the possession of a tribal chief in southwestern Pakistan last October, it had all the signs of a blockbuster find. Never before had a mummy been unearthed in Pakistan. Was she an Egyptian princess looted from an ancient tomb thousands of years ago and adorned with ornaments in ancient Mesopotamia or Persia? Were these the remains of an ancient Persian royal?

The find seemed too amazing to be true. In fact, it was. Last month, after five months of chemical tests, microbial diagnosis, X-rays, radiocarbon dating and 200 C.T. scans, Pakistani experts concluded the mummy is a fake. "The mummified body is 100% modern," according to archaeological chemist Muhammad Toseef-ul-Hassan. What initially seemed to be one of the world's most intriguing archaeological discoveries is turning into one of Pakistan's strangest murder mysteries.

In October, Karachi police received reports that a mummy was being offered for sale to "big foreigners," including an unidentified ambassador. A 50-minute amateur video of the mummy, with a 1990 date stamp, featured close-ups of its gold crown and breastplate. The asking price: $10 million. The possession of antiquities older than 50 years is a crime in Pakistan, as is their forgery; Karachi's deputy superintendent of police, Muhammad Farooq Awan, arrested the video's distributor, who led police to Quetta, Baluchistan's rugged provincial capital. There, Awan and his team raided the home of Wali Muhammad Reeki, a powerful tribal chief who keeps two pet camels on his estate and has a taste for their milk. Reeki took the police to a relative's house. In a locked room, hidden under a carpet, they found the mummy that Reeki said he'd acquired from a man claiming it had been coughed out of the ground in an earthquake.

A team of police officers dragged the 300-kg sarcophagus outside and wedged it into their Toyota Hiace van. When they opened it less than an hour later in the Quetta police station, they found the mummified body wrapped in brown cotton cloth and stretched out on a woven mat coated with a mixture of wax, resin and honey. The mummy's gold crown and breastplate were engraved with the cuneiform writing used in ancient Mesopotamia and an image of Ahura-Mazda, the god of Zoroastrianism associated with ancient Persia. Encased in a heavy wood coffin, it was placed in what initially appeared to be a stone sarcophagus (it turned out to be made of grains of opaque white glass). Astounded by the find, police loaded the mummy into the van and jounced along dusty back roads on a 24-hour ride home to Karachi.

As news of the mummy filtered out, other countries began to stake their claims. Tehran, believing it was ancient Persian royalty who had married an Egyptian, said it would take steps to get it back. Afghanistan's Taliban regime also claimed ownership for reasons that are unclear. But in January when Tehran finally sent a team of experts to Karachi, they left in disgust, terming the mummy a "phony without any cultural value."

Authorities may never know the identity of the victim—believed to have been no more than 21 years old when she died—or of her enterprising murderer (or team of killers) who went to enormous trouble to duplicate mummification techniques and the ancient cuneiform writing. Saleem ul Haq, director of Karachi's archaeology department, is convinced the perpetrator of the fraud is "definitely someone who has links to archaeology." But as good as his attention to detail may have been, it wasn't good enough. The first clue: South Asia's ancient civilizations had no tradition of mummification. Also, at Karachi's National Museum, where the mummy was stored, fungus began to grow on the body. Still, given the humidity of Pakistan's southern port megacity, a moldy mummy was not inconceivable. Officials rushed to protect it in a sealed nitrogen chamber.

More anomalies piled up. The mummy had gas in its abdomen and pelvis, suggesting faulty preservation techniques. Its brain had been extracted through the mouth, while Egyptian mummies had theirs removed through the nose. An incision in the abdomen looked suspiciously like a stab wound. Some of the woman's vertebrae were dislocated or fractured. All of her teeth were missing. Grammatical errors in the cuneiform inscriptions suggested the engraver knew modern Persian. The mummy's gold ornaments weighed only 15 grams. "No princess could wear such poor jewelry," says the Karachi archaeology department's Haq.

Forged artifacts are nothing new in Pakistan, whose ancient Gandhara-era Buddhist treasures are frequently copied and sold to unsuspecting collectors. Police have charged no one in the case, either for murder or forgery. So, for now, the body remains like a delicate patient on life support behind a locked door in a hermetically sealed glass chamber in the bowels of the National Museum, preserved by a steady stream of nitrogen. It is Pakistan's best-conserved and most intensively studied murder victim.