Islamabad - The mummy of an ancient princess discovered in Pakistan recently has been attacked by microbes, a newspaper reported on Monday.
"Microbes have attacked the mummy. But the damage, if any, has not yet been assessed," Islamabad's daily The News quoted Dr Asma Ebrahim, who is working on the preservation of the 2 600-year-old Egyptian-style Persian mummy, as saying.
She suggested that the mummy be exposed to gamma rays to kill the microbes. "The mummy should also be kept in liquid nitrogen to protect it from further attacks and be provided minus 14 degrees celsius temperature to preserve it for centuries."
The mummy is currently being kept in National Museum in Karachi.
The report said the museum officials were trying to hire a mobile X-ray machine to take images of the mummy before any treatment.
"(They want) to take a number of X-rays for close examination, research and analysis of its skull, bones, skeleton, gold crown and plate and other valuables, if any, hidden in the mummy," Ebrahim said.
The mummy, recovered from the house of a tribesman in southwestern Balouchistan province, is at the centre of controversy between archeologists from Pakistan and neighbouring Iran.
Iranian experts are reported to have been staking claim over the mummy. Mohammd Zaeri Amirani, Iran's consul general in Karachi, said on Saturday that the Persian mummy was smuggled out of Iran.
But reports quoted an unspecified Pakistani official as saying the mummy belongs to Pakistan.
"Mummies are found in the world only in one country, Egypt, and nowhere else," Pakistan's renowned historian and archeologist Dr Ahmed Hasan Dani said last week.
The archeology professor said mummies were never found in Iran. "There is no practice of making mummies in Iran or Iraq. Egypt is the only place where mummies were made." - Sapa-DPA