Word: cuneiforms
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...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...
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...
...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...