Persian Princess

The Persian Princess or Persian Mummy is a mummy of an alleged Persian princess who surfaced in Pakistani Baluchistan in October 2000. After considerable attention and further investigation, the mummy proved to be an archaeological forgery and possibly a murder victim.

Discovery

The body that became known as the Persian Princess was located on 19 October 2000 at the home of tribal leader Wali Mohammed Reeki in Kharan, Balochistan, near the border with Afghanistan. Pakistani authorities located the mummy during a murder investigation after receiving a videotape in which Ali Aqbar offered a mummy for sale. During questioning, Aqbar directed police to Reeki's home.

Reeki told investigators that he had acquired the mummy from an Iranian man, Sharif Shah Bakhi, who claimed to have found it after an earthquake near Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. Before it came into police custody, the mummy had reportedly been offered for sale on the black antiquities market for 600 million Pakistani rupees (approximately US$11 million in 2000).

The woman wore a gold crown, a gold face mask and a gold chest plate. An inscription on the chest plate identified her as Rhodogune, a daughter of the Achaemenid king Xerxes I. The body rested on a layer described as wax and honey.

The inscriptions also raised doubts. Iranian philologist Rüdiger Schmitt found numerous grammatical errors and determined that parts of the text had been copied from the Behistun inscription, a royal inscription commissioned by Darius the Great, rather than from an original royal funerary text. Schmitt also noted that the inscription used the Greek form Rhodogune instead of the expected Old Persian Wardegauna for the princess's name.

Following the forensic findings, Pakistani police investigated the woman's death as a possible murder and arrested several suspects in Balochistan. Burial The Edhi Foundation took custody of the body, and on 5 August 2005, announced that it was to be interred with proper burial rites. However, police and other government officials never responded to numerous requests, and it was not until 2008 that the foundation finally carried out the burial.

Representations in contemporary art The Persian Princess is the name of an exhibition presented in August 2016 in Jerusalem, by artist Hili Greenfeld. The exhibition functions as a tribute to the anonymous woman who, in an instant, went from the status of a princess in a gold-plated coffin displayed in a national museum, to the victim of a vicious murder in whom everyone quickly lost interest. The extreme transformation of the perception of the archeological object – from an honored Princess to a woman who was murdered – is what interests Greenfeld.

Greenfeld picked up the signs and symbols used by the forgers, such as engraved rosettes, cypress gold, the icon of Ahura Mazda, and gold crowns. She painted the symbols on artificial grass, and created a hybrid of lyrical abstract paintings, Persian rugs and graffiti murals. The works that are shown on the walls and on the floor seem to be graffiti murals and then seem to be rugs, but in both cases they are synthetic imitations of the original.