A Princess Mummy Sparked a Custody War Between Three Countries. Then the Autopsy Results Came Back. 48%
By Tim Newcomb20%
7/16/2026, 5:00:05 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Overconfidence Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 28.3% saturation with 257 hits. Analysis detected 1,903 faulty-reasoning hits from 909 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 49.3% and a BS Rank of 48% (11,394 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 52.10% of the article peer group.
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:The surprising discovery of a Persian princess mummy fascinated the archaeological community in 2000.
It took experts months to figure out that, rather than a 2,500-year-old mummy, the body was that of a 50-year-old woman who died in 1996.
Even more striking was the discovery that the deceased was likely a murder victim.
For sale: A 2,500-year-old Persian princess mummy.
The price: A modest $11 million.
The catch (only to be discovered much later): The whole thing was a fraud that likely included a murder victim.
In October 2000, rumors swirled in the antiquity community about a Persian princess mummy from 600 B.C.E. for sale.
Pakistan resident Ali Akbar had sent feelers out trying to sell the mummy, but local authorities caught on, and eventually, the actual mummy was found in the rural Pakistan mountains at the home of tribal leader Wali Mohammad Reeki.
Reeki claimed that an Iranian man, Sharif Shah Bakhi, had found the mummy after an earthquake.
Authorities arrested the men for selling antiquities and sent the mummy to the National Museum in Pakistan’s Karachi.
Eager to publicize the arrest, authorities held a press conference touting their investigation, highlighting the mummy, and unknowingly launching a feud between Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan over the rightful owners of such a prized possession, according to Archaeology.
Asma Ibrahim, curator at the Pakistan museum, was enamored with the find.
“The whole mummy impressed me a lot,” said Ibrahim, according to a 2001 BBC program.
“It was a beautiful piece of art.”
Archaeologist Ahmed Hasan Dani from Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad declared the mummy a princess from 600 B.C.E., based on the presence of Egyptian-style wrappings and a wooden coffin carved with writings and images.
Also included in the find were a stone sarcophagus and gold breastplate, which—along with the wooden coffin—were adorned with cuneiform inscriptions and fanciful adornments.
The writings appeared to declare the mummy to be the princess Rhodugune, a daughter of the great King Xerxes.
No Persian mummy had ever been found before, but instead of asking questions, excitement grew over rewriting history.
“Mummies were not [made] by the Iranians.
Cuneiform writing was not used by the Egyptians,” said Ahmed Hasan Dani, a Pakistan archaeologist interviewed by the BBC.
“Mumm[ies were made] by Egyptians and so how could cuneiform writing be on this mummy is difficult to say.”
The clues began to emerge.
According to Archaeology, insurance companies wouldn’t cover the mummy until they had more legitimate certification of its authenticity.
Then, museum officials admitted that some of the inscriptions on the breastplate, stone, or wood may have been added by looters.
As the story of the mummy continued to gain popularity, Oscar White Muscarella from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was shown news of the find, and said it looked remarkably like a potential museum piece he had been shown.
Further research showed it to have been the same mummy—one that he had immediately discounted as a fraud.
Small details in the writing showed grammatical mistakes—errors that would have been easy to make hundreds of years post-broad cuneiform usage, but that nobody would have made at the time.
Even the name, Rhodugune, is a Greek translation of Wardegauna, which would have been the original Persian name.
“That’s really a fatal error, because there’s no way that an old Persian king would have had the name of his daughter inscribed in a Greek form,” Nicholas Sims-Williams, a University of London professor, told the BBC.
Investigations showed pencil marks—lead pencils were invented within the last 200 years—on the wooden coffin that had evidently been used to help with the tracing of the ancient symbols.
Even the mat on which the body sat on had been made in the last 50 years.
The adornments in the coffin were also fake, and not like anything seen in Egypt.
But still, local officials wanted to believe they had a true Egyptian mummy with a fabricated princess story to inflate the purchase price.
The alternative was certainly much darker.
With doubts finally rising, the body came into question.
Before unwrapping, a CT scan showed that all of the organs had been removed.
A serious historical mistake—while ancient Egyptians did remove organs in the mummification process, they always left the heart, and this heart was nowhere to be seen.
“The hearts had to stay in the body because when you got to the next world, you’d have to be able to think and you’d have to be able to speak to say the magical spells that was going to reassemble your body,” said Bob Brier, an expert in Egyptian mummies.
Officials took the body to a hospital and unwrapped the mummified remains for an actual autopsy.
At first glance, it was obvious that the mummification process had not been done in the classical Egyptian way—with incisions in different places and in unusual styles.
The autopsy confirmed that the body was that of an adult woman, likely aged 50... who died in 1996.
The probable cause of death was a broken neck due to a blunt injury.
The Persian princess mummy went from stunning discovery to fraud to murder (or, potentially, grave robbery—the case was never solved) in a matter of months.
The identity of the woman who was almost a Persian princess in death remains a mystery.
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100%flagged-word coverageNicholas Sims-Williams
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