Archaeology is a very meaningful but extremely boring job, and sometimes it takes countless efforts to restore and study a cultural relic. Due to the limited cognitive ability, sometimes even experts will deviate in the judgment of cultural relics, thus making a oolong. In the treasure hunting program of the fire in the past few years, there have been incidents in which the real treasure was destroyed due to the misjudgment of experts.
In our neighbouring country, Pakistan, there has also been a oolong incident in which experts misjudged.
It happened in October 2000. At that time, near Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, a mummy was found. Many people know that mummies are dried corpses made after death, preserved thousands or thousands of years later, which is one of the proofs of the extremely high level of ancient medicine. Mummies are most found in Egypt, and the ancient Egyptians once had a custom of making mummies.
Because of this, in Pakistan, where mummies rarely appear, this is undoubtedly an important discovery, and experts quickly arrived at the scene.
According to preliminary judgments, the mummy was a woman who was wrapped in an ancient Egyptian mummy and placed in a sarcophagus. On the surface of the sarcophagus, a wooden coffin with gold leaf and cuneiform writing was also covered. It is soaked in a mixture of paraffin and honey, covered by stone slabs, and wears a gold crown on the forehead.
On the chest of the mummy, there is a gold plate with an ancient inscription on it, and according to the inscription, experts have found that this woman is the daughter of the Persian king Xerxes I.
Xerxes I was a great emperor of the ancient Middle East, born around 519 BC. This man was so impressed that he launched many conquest wars. During his reign, it was a period of great prosperity in the Persian Empire, and after his death, the empire turned from prosperity to decline. So, if the mummy is really Xerxes' daughter, it's at least 2,500 years old.
According to the inscription, several authoritative archaeologists have determined that the mummy was a Persian princess and the daughter of a famous emperor. In this way, it is extremely valuable. Therefore, it attracted the covetousness of many people at that time. Both Iran and Afghanistan claimed that they owned the mummy.
Just a year later, however, things took a turn for the worse. After careful study, the female director of the National Museum of Pakistan at the time found an important problem: the mummy was actually later than the age of the coffin. Even more debatable is the age of the covering beneath the mummy, which was only five years from then, and the inscription proving the identity of the mummy, the text on the gold plate on the chest, did not conform to the correct grammar of ancient Persian.
The curator couldn't sit still, wondering if some experts had made a mistake. With this question in mind, she took the mummy to the hospital, X-rayed it, and made important discoveries. It turned out that the mummy was not made according to the ancient Egyptian mummification method, and its tendons did not decay after more than two thousand years, but still intact.
Based on the results of the X-ray examination, the curator published his investigation report in April 2001. In the report, she pointed out that the mummy, which experts believe is more than 2500 years old, is not a Persian princess at all, but is actually a woman living in the modern era, who died between the ages of 21 and 25, around 1996, that is, about 5 years ago, and died because of a blunt cut in the neck.
As a result, an archaeological discovery that was originally a sensation turned into a suspenseful case. And those experts who originally came to their conclusions were undoubtedly very depressed. It also proves that archaeology sometimes really needs rigorous certification to be rewarded, and even experts make mistakes.