Word: goldings
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When Karachi police discovered a gold-bedecked mummy believed to be at least 2,600 years old in the possession of a tribal chief in southwestern Pakistan last October, it had all the signs of a blockbuster find. Never before had a mummy been unearthed in Pakistan. Was she an Egyptian princess looted from an ancient tomb thousands of years ago and adorned with ornaments in ancient Mesopotamia or Persia? Were these the remains of an ancient Persian royal...
...October, Karachi police received reports that a mummy was being offered for sale to "big foreigners," including an unidentified ambassador. A 50-minute amateur video of the mummy, with a 1990 date stamp, featured close-ups of its gold crown and breastplate. The asking price: $10 million. The possession of antiquities older than 50 years is a crime in Pakistan, as is their forgery; Karachi's deputy superintendent of police, Muhammad Farooq Awan, arrested the video's distributor, who led police to Quetta, Baluchistan's rugged provincial capital. There, Awan and his team raided the home of Wali Muhammad Reeki...
...into their Toyota Hiace van. When they opened it less than an hour later in the Quetta police station, they found the mummified body wrapped in brown cotton cloth and stretched out on a woven mat coated with a mixture of wax, resin and honey. The mummy's gold crown and breastplate were engraved with the cuneiform writing used in ancient Mesopotamia and an image of Ahura-Mazda, the god of Zoroastrianism associated with ancient Persia. Encased in a heavy wood coffin, it was placed in what initially appeared to be a stone sarcophagus (it turned out to be made...
...mummies had theirs removed through the nose. An incision in the abdomen looked suspiciously like a stab wound. Some of the woman's vertebrae were dislocated or fractured. All of her teeth were missing. Grammatical errors in the cuneiform inscriptions suggested the engraver knew modern Persian. The mummy's gold ornaments weighed only 15 grams. "No princess could wear such poor jewelry," says the Karachi archaeology department...
...Despite last week's show of eco-friendliness, Rove's biggest image failure is the environment. The White House complains that some positive decisions have been underplayed by the press. But such spin doesn't approach Rove's usual gold standard. Why didn't the master strategist see this coming? He knew Republicans scored badly on education, and he hatched an effective plan to fix the problem. But when it came to being green, he was as blind as Bush...