Karachi Division

The Persian Princess of Karachi

In October 2000 Pakistani police seized from dealers in Karachi a mummy in a carved wooden coffin, with a gold mask and a breastplate whose inscription named her a daughter of King Xerxes. Eleven million dollars was being asked for her, and Iran and Pakistan began to argue over ownership. The National Museum ran a CT scan and radiocarbon dating: the mat beneath the body was woven around 1996, the woman was about twenty-one, she had died in 1996 of a broken neck, and the body was mummified afterwards. The cuneiform on the breastplate contained grammatical errors. A case about selling an antiquity became a murder inquiry, and was never solved.