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Illicit Antiquities |
TV Review: The Mystery of the Persian Mummy
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A wide audience was exposed to the true nature of the illicit trade in antiquities when the BBC’s flagship science series, Horizon, devoted its 20 September documentary to ‘The Mystery of the Persian Mummy’. The hour-long programme, which described how a mummy, apparently of an ancient Persian princess, was offered for sale on the black market, confiscated, studied and eventually proven to be a modern fake (see In The News CWC issues 7 & 8), highlighted the very worst aspects of the illicit trade: gigantic amounts of cash changing hands, increasing incidence of fakes and means through which they can be insinuated into the system, targeted approaches to major museums, misuse of genuine knowledge and scholarship, waste of precious resources and time, and the gruesome and horrifying lengths to which traffickers are prepared to go. On 19 October 2000, Dr Asma Ibrahim, then curator of the National Museum of Pakistan, was informed by police that an illicit antiquity — a mummy with gold crown, facemask and chestplate, lying in a carved wooden box — had been impounded in the northern city of Quetta near the Afghan border. It had been traced after being seen in a video seized from an Iranian suspect in Karachi. The suspect, Ali Aqbar, maintained that the mummy had been found after earthquake disturbance at a desert site. He was trying to sell it on the black art market. Prices quoted during the programme ranged from $11 million to $30 million. Two strands of investigation were necessary: first, into the background of the mummified woman, in the hope of better understanding her archaeological context and place in history; second, into the criminal activities which had led to her body being illegally offered for sale as an illicit antiquity. These two strands quickly became entwined. The mummy
Archaeologists were initially wildly excited about the mummy. Her gold chestplate was inscribed with a cuneiform inscription which implied a Persian origin, yet no evidence of mummification was previously known outside of Egypt. This discovery seemed to indicate that ancient Persians may have copied mummification techniques and applied them to their own nobility — and judging from the richness of this burial, with its gold adornments and stone, possibly alabaster, outer coffin this was indeed a woman of considerable social status. The inscription described her as Rhodugune, daughter of the legendary Persian king Xerxes about whom little is known. Other clues seemed to back up this identification: rosette motifs decorating the mummy are familiar icons at Xerxes’ royal palace in Persepolis, southern Iran; images of seven Cypress trees, the symbol for the ancient city of Hamadan, were seen as important since the city is known to have been of sacred importance to Xerxes; and depictions of the chief Zoroastrian deity Ahuramazda also suggested an intimate link with ancient Persian royalty. Closer study of the cuneiform inscriptions raised the first doubts. Although some mistakes could easily have been made by illiterate stone masons or goldsmiths copying the texts, grammatical errors, specifically mistakes in applying genitive endings to words, were difficult to explain. Use of the name ‘Rhodugune’ — a later Greek translation of the princess’ original Persian name ‘Wardegauna’ was impossible to explain and experts concluded that inscriptions were fake. X-rays and CAT scans of the mummy to establish methods of mummification also led to the same conclusion. Although this was apparently a ritual mummification — internal organs removed, hands crossed over chest, bandages and resin applied in the usual way — some discrepancies were noticed. Specifically, the heart (crucially required to remain in the body according to ancient Egyptian burial lore) was not present, the abdominal incision made to remove internal organs was not only too large but in the wrong place, and the brain had not been removed in the way perfected by ancient Egyptian mummifiers. Furthermore, delicate tendons and ligaments which would have decayed over centuries were clearly intact. The discovery of pencil marks applied to the wooden coffin during construction confirmed — along with the other clues — that the whole package was a recent fabrication. The implications were deeply disturbing and became more so when it emerged that the woman, who had been mummified in the previous two years or so, had died a violent death during which her neck was broken and her lower right spine damaged by a blunt blow. It was impossible to tell if her injuries were the result of a tragic accident (after which her body was quickly looted from its grave and sold), or something yet more sinister. The police opened a murder enquiry. The criminal investigationTo perpetrate a forgery of this kind would clearly involve a team of people (some of whom had a good, probably professional or scholarly, knowledge of archaeology and anatomy), money, forward planning, and resources. The operation had been carried out in a hot country where bodies decompose quickly, so on acquiring a body the criminal team must already have prepared a lab and mummification equipment: half a ton of drying chemicals (bicarbonate of soda, sodium chloride and table salt), surgical implements, resins and bandages. The raw materials for the burial assemblage — gold, wood for the coffin (later radiocarbon dated to 250 years of age), alabaster — must have been expensively acquired and crafted. Oscar Muscarella, expert in Near Eastern forgeries based at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who recognized a typical forgers’ mistake on the wooden box (an ancient depiction of the god Ahuramazda, known from a rock carving, had been directly copied, but with no true understanding of its meaning the forger had missed essential elements) believed that this fake most likely came from Iran, well-known as a major production centre for counterfeit antiquities. This made sense since, unknown to the Pakistani authorities, Muscarella had in 1999 been approached by an Iranian called Amanollah Riggi, who sent him four photographs of the mummy. In a follow-up phone call a few days later, Riggi explained that he was acting as a middleman, had been advised to approach Muscarella by a professor, and had access to an extraordinary discovery — the mummy — of which he had a video. In the apparent belief that the mummy was genuine, he offered it to the museum. The police are now re-arresting and re-interrogating known witnesses in Quetta and middlemen, in the hope of shedding further light on both the forging operation and possible murder. The woman, whose face was reconstructed during the programme and is characteristic of inhabitants of the border region of Pakistan and Iran, remains unidentified but can at least now be buried in decent Muslim tradition. Chilling conclusionsDr Ibrahim and the scientists investigating this sad history were clearly shocked and upset at the sordid lengths to which forgers had gone to create a fake antiquity. Charles Milroy, consultant pathologist said: ‘It is a crime, whether or not it was a murder, it’s immoral, it’s unethical and it is illegal’. But should we be surprised that such gruesome depths are now being plumbed to feed demand for illicit antiquities, when astronomical sums are involved and dealing in unprovenanced antiquities is still regarded as acceptable in some quarters? Nor can we reassure ourselves with the fact that this was an isolated incident. Since then, two more so-called Persian mummies, ritually embalmed and adorned in the same way, have apparently surfaced on the international market for $6 million. The BBC investigation concluded with the ‘chilling possibility that hidden away in this wild border land is a mummy factory and the prospect of more victims’. We can only wonder how many of these terrible creations may have already been secretly sold to collectors and institutions less well-informed and less scrupulous than the ones seen during this eye-opening documentary. Read the transcript of this programme on the BBC WWW site at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/persianmummy.shtmlFirst posted April 2002; Page design updated September 2006 |
