I have never really paid much attention to pseudoarchaeological finds before this class. I knew of the more popular ones that we have been over in class, but while researching for this blog post I came across the Persian Princess. After just finishing an introduction to classics class as well as covering repatriation for another class, I quickly became interested. The Persian Princess is a mummy that was adorned in gold and a inscripted breast plate that said, “I am the daughter of the great King Xerxes, I am Rhodugune.” The mummy was laid in a carved stone coffin that was enclosed in a wooden sarcophagus. The Persian Princess was found during a police raid in Pakistan after the police were tipped off that the mummy was illegally sold on the black market for 20 million dollars. After the discovery, the Persian Princess became one of the greatest discoveries because no other mummified Persian has been known to exist. Many countries within the area had began to fight over who the mummy belongs to, for research purposes it stayed in Pakistan and was transported tot eh Karachi National Museum.

During the analysis of the mummy, Dr. Asma Ibrahim (the curator for the Karachi National Museum) found some evidence that actually suggests that it was a fake. The inscriptions on the breast plate had seemed to be misspelled. If the mummy was a royal decent, lots of work would have gone into it final resting place as well as the jewelry and accessories that adorned her. Dr. Asma also noticed that the mummification process had not been done properly. Some of the operations that the Egyptians would have practiced had had skipped over – which suggested to the curator that the mummy could have been an ancient mummy that the smugglers had dressed up to make more money off of the mummy. I thought this was interesting because I completely thought the mummy had turned out to be a fake itself, but the curator had never alluded to that. It tunes out, through CT scans and X-rays, the body inside the mummy had been a woman that lived during the recent past. The woman’s neck was broke and after an autopsy, it was confirmed that she was most likely murdered – an article I read had said that she could have been murdered just to provide a body for the hoax.

This fraud had been a bit different than the cases we have discussed in class. Money was definitely the biggest motive in the scheme, but the smugglers were not looking for fame (which is normally correlates with money). They probably knew that if this mummy became famous then no doubt someone would find out the truth and want to have the smugglers caught. I have never really heard of any cases where people have been murdered and dressed to allude to the ancient past.