Doubts
News of the Persian Princess prompted American archaeologist Oscar White Muscarella to come out about an incident the previous March when he was shown photographs of a similar mummy. Amanollah Riggi, a middleman working in behalf of an unidentified antiquities dealer in Pakistan, had approached him, claiming its owners were a Zoroastrian family who had brought it to the country. The seller had claimed that it was a daughter of Xerxes, based on a translation of the cuneiform of the breastplate.
The cuneiform text on the breastplate contained a passage from the Behistun inscription in western Iran. The Behistun inscription was carved during the reign of Darius, the father of Xerxes. When the dealer's representative had sent a piece of a coffin to be carbon dated, analysis had shown that the coffin was only around 250 years old. Muscarella had suspected a forgery and severed contact. He had informed Interpol through the FBI.
When Pakistani professor Ahmad Dani, director of the Institute of Asian Civilizations in Islamabad, studied the item, he realized the corpse was not as old as the coffin. The mat below the body was about five years old. He contacted Asma Ibrahim, the curator of the National Museum of Pakistan, who investigated further. During the investigation, Iran and the Taliban repeated their demands. The Taliban claimed that they had apprehended the smugglers that had taken the mummy out of Afghanistan.
The inscriptions on the breastplate were not in proper grammatical Persian. Instead of a Persian form of the daughter's name, Wardegauna, the forgers had used a Greek version Rhodugune. CAT and X-ray scans in Agha Khan Hospital indicated that the mummification had not been made following ancient Egyptian custom - for example, the heart had been removed along with the rest of the internal organs, whereas the heart of a genuine Egyptian mummy would normally be left inside the body. Furthermore, tendons that should have decayed over the centuries were still intact.
Ibrahim published her report on April 17, 2001. In it, she stated that the "Persian princess" was in fact a modern woman about 21–25 years of age, who had died around 1996, possibly killed with a blunt instrument to the neck. Her teeth had been removed after death, and her hip joint, pelvis and backbone damaged, before the body had been filled with powder. Police began to investigate a possible murder and arrested a number of suspects in Baluchistan.
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