GET on to the internet, click on the search engine 'Bizarre-Pakistan', ask for and then download 'mummy-mummiya'.

'MUMMY-MUMMIYA..... The word 'mummy' comes from the Arabic word 'mummiya'. Mummiya means bitumen or pitch, the tar we use on road surfaces. Arab invaders noted that badly prepared, blackened mummies looked as if they had been dipped in pitch.... Ancient Egyptians believed that everyone had a soul after death. The soul relies on the body for a place to reside. After death the soul travels between the corpse and the Kingdom of the Dead. When the soul returns from its travels in the Kingdom of the Dead it would reunite with the body of the deceased. In order to do this the soul needed to be able to recognize its body. Thus, preserving a corpse through mummification came into practice.

From Newsline of December 2000, 'The Mystery of the Mummy' by Massoud Ansari:

"......The mummy was discovered by chance by the Sindh police when they arrested Ali Akbar in Karachi in the course of a murder investigation. During a search of his house, they found the video made of the mummy, and upon interrogation, Akbar divulged that the actual mummy was in Quetta at Reeki's residence and he had been assigned to hand the video to one. Asfandyar, who was to smuggle it out of the country. On the basis of this information and after seeking permission from the Balochistan authorities, the Sindh police raided Reeki's house and recovered the antique.

"Unaware of its importance, however, they brought it to Karachi by road in an ordinary vehicle and kept it in a local police station for at least three days. Afterwards, they contacted the renowned archaeologist, Professor Emeritus Ahmed Hasan Dani in Islamabad, who asked them to send him photographs of the mummy. After seeing the photographs, Professor Dani immediately rushed to Karachi to closely examine what is surely one of the most significant antiques ever found in Pakistan. The Sindh police disclosed the discovery of the find in a crowded press conference only after Professor Dani confirmed its importance.......

"According to him, the art of mummification belongs exclusively to Egypt. However, he added, the inscriptions on the gold plate are in cuneiform script, which was used in ancient Mesopotamia and later adopted by the Babylonians and subsequently brought to Persia by the Archaemenians......

"However, investigations conducted by the curator of Karachi's National Museum, Dr. Asma Ibrahim, suggest a Persian connection. Her findings are based on the fact that the wooden sarcophagus is engraved with an image of Ahura Mazda, the supreme Zoroastrian deity, and a specimen of cuneiform script, which was extant in ancient Persia about 600 BC.......".

From the magazine Archaeology, an official publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, Volume 54 Number 1, January/February 2001, Special Report: 'Saga of the Persian Princess' by Kristin M Romey and Mark Rose - 'In a dangerous corner of the world, uneasy neighbours clamour for the gilded remains of a mummified noblewoman. Trouble is, she's a fraud':

"The bizarre tale of a mummy adorned with a cuneiform-inscribed gold plaque identifying it as a 2,600-year-old Persian princess, perhaps, according to one translation, a daughter of the king Xerxes, began trickling out of Pakistan this past October. Found during a murder investigation, the mummy, an amalgam of Egyptian and Persian elements, had evidently been for sale on the black market for a cool $11 million. While archaeologists in Karachi tried to make sense of the mummy, a dispute between Iran and Pakistan broke out over its ownership. Afghanistan's Taliban regime hinted that they, too, might claim it. Then, one November day, thousands of miles from where the mummy lay in Pakistan's National Museum under the watchful eye of armed guards, 'Archaeology' was shown documents identifying the Persian princess as a fraud.

"According to newspaper reports, Pakistani authorities learned of the mummy in mid-October, when they received a tip that Karachi resident Ali Akbar had a video tape showing a mummy he was selling. After interrogation, Akbar led police to the remains, which were being kept in the house of tribal leader Wali Mohammad Reeki in Quetta, capital of Pakistan's southwestern Balochistan Province, which borders Iran and Afghanistan. Reeki told police he had received the mummy from Sharif Shah Bakhi, an Iranian who allegedly found it after an earthquake in a nearby town. Reeki and Bakhi had agreed to sell the mummy and split the profits; Akbar's role is less clear. Reeki said an unidentified representative of an anonymous foreign buyer had offered 60 million rupees ($1.1 million) for the mummy, well below the 600 million rupee ($11 million) asking price. Reeki and Akbar were charged with violating Pakistan's Antiquity Act, which carries a ten-year maximum sentence; Bakhi remains at large.

"The mummy was brought to the National Museum in Karachi as news of it spread quickly through the local and international press. In an October 26 press conference, clips of which appeared on NBC's evening news, archaeologist Ahmed Hasan Dani of Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad announced that the mummy, wrapped in Egyptian style and resting in a wooden coffin carved with cuneiform writing and images of the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda, was that of a princess dated to ca. 600 B.C.....

"Shortly after the press conference, the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization, claiming the mummy was of a member of the Persian royal family, said it would take legal action through UNESCO for its return. Salim-ul-Haq, director of Pakistan's Archaeological Department's Headquarters, retorted that the mummy was found in Kharan in Balochistan Province, "which is one hundred percent Pakistani territory. The mummy is property of Pakistan." At that point, Iran said it was cooperating with Interpol for the mummy's return. Pakistan's foreign minister warned against politicizing the issue, while the Taliban, the rulers of most of Afghanistan, demanded that their archaeologists play a role in deciding its ownership........

"Two weeks after the discovery first hit the press, Oscar White Muscarella of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and author of The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures9, visited Archaeology's offices, where we asked for his thoughts on the Persian princess. While unaware of the recent find, Muscarella volunteered that its description sounded remarkably similar to photographs of a gold-adorned mummy sent to him last March by a New Jersey resident on behalf of an unidentified dealer in Pakistan - in fact, they were the same.

"Muscarella had received four photographs of a mummy in a wooden coffin, replete with golden crown, mask, and inscribed breastplate. An accompanying letter stated that the mummy was owned by a Pakistani acquaintance and was brought by Zoroastrian families many years ago from Iran to Pakistan. The author claimed that the mummy was the daughter of the Persian king Xerxes, referring to an attached one-page translation of the cuneiform inscription on the breastplate. The owners, he wrote, had a video of the mummy - most likely the same video found with Ali Akbar in Karachi - that could be sent to New York if the museum was interested in purchasing the princess.

"Muscarella, who suspected immediately that the mummy was a fraud, contacted the translator of the inscription, a cuneiform expert at a major American university, and found out that the dealer's New Jersey representative had not given him the complete analysis of it. The inscription does indeed contain the line 'I am the daughter of the great king Xerxes,' as well as a sizable chunk lifted straight from a famous inscription of the king Darius (522-486 B.C.) at Behistun in western Iran. The Behistun inscription, which records the king's accomplishments, dates to 520-519 B.C., substantially later than the 600 B.C. date proposed for the mummy. The second page of analysis listed several problems with the mummy's inscription that led the scholar to believe that its author wrote in a manner inconsistent with Old Persian. The inscription, he concluded, was likely a modern falsification, probably dating 'from no earlier than the 1930s'.""Archaeology has submitted Muscarella's documentation to federal authorities, who have forwarded the matter to Interpol. Hopefully, by the time this article goes to press, the dispute between uneasy neighbours in a dangerous corner of the world will be resolved. While the Persian princess may be a fraud, perhaps a genuine Egyptian mummy with forged Persian additions, she is a reminder of the powerful emotions that can be sparked by unprecedented, or unbelievable, archaeological discoveries."

(Courtesy websites and publications mentioned above)

Stop press: Dr Vera Sohrab Katrak (PhD, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, Faculty of Arts, 1959), says the mummy is a fake. Should it be proved that the mummy lying in the wooden sarcophagus at the National Museum in Karachi originates from the Achamaenian period of Persian history, I, as a surviving Achamaenian, lodge my claim on behalf of my fellow Achamaenians.