Word: anciently
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...