KARACHI, May 11: The Edhi Foundation has requested National Museum of Pakistan to either take back the fake mummy, discovered in the country some time back, or allow the Foundation to bury it without further delay.
The Foundation has made the formal request through a letter to the museum authorities. It has also sent some reminders to the concerned authorities but to no avail.
“It has been more than two years since the mummy was placed in the Edhi morgue at Sohrab Goth. It now looks that all the officials concerned have forgotten the mummy,” remarked Rizwan Edhi.
“The Foundation had made such a request because it had not been paid anything to keep the mummy in the cold storage for such a long time. This obviously can not go on forever. The entire cost of preservation for two years has been borne by the Foundation,” he said.
Packed in a sealed coffin, the mummy has been kept in the Edhi cold storage at Sohrab Goth occupying a considerable space.
A spokesman for the Edhi Foundation told Dawn that the morgue charged Rs300 for keeping a body in the cold storage for three days.
“As far as the mummy is concerned, no government functionary even bothered to inquire about its condition or find out how much charges have accumulated over the years,” he said.
The mummy was seized in Quetta from Wali Mohammad Reeki during a murder investigation by the police. It was claimed by Iran and Afghanistan’s Taliban besides Pakistan.
It was kept in Karachi soon after the police retrieved it from a tribal leader in Quetta, who was trying to sell it for millions of dollars.
Quoting the country’s antiquity laws, Pakistan government had contended that the mummy had been found in Pakistan and should, therefore, stay at the National Museum in Karachi.
The authorities concerned had also carried out a CT-scan of the mummy indicating that the ‘princess’ might have been at the age of 21 at the time of her death.
Pakistani experts, with the assistance of UK and Germany-based archaeologists, also tried to find out whether the princess had died a natural death or not.
It was subsequently found that the mummy, adorned with a cuneiform-inscribed gold plaque identifying it as a 2,600-year-old Persian princess, was a fraud.
Two weeks after the discovery of the mummy hit the local and international press, Oscar White Muscarella of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and author of The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures visited Archaeology’s offices, where he was asked for his thoughts on the Persian princess. Mr Muscarella stated 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.
Seven months earlier, Mr Muscarella had received four photos of a mummy in a wooden coffin, replete with golden crown, mask and inscribed breastplate.
