Jon & Zoe Do Iran (et al.)

Tehran | April 14, 2009

While in Tehran we visited (yet another) Archeological Museum. I shouldn’t say yet another as that implies that I don’t like them, when really I do. I’ve also discovered that I care remarkably little about who invades who and when, but an incredible amount about why and how. It seems that archeological museums are just the same as museums at home, it’s just they have many different types of museums here so they call them archeological museums so distinguish them from the others. Other types include: carpet museums and musical instrument museums. It’s be fair to say I’m not very interested in carpets or musical instruments, and that trips to the the musical instrument museum could be used as a punishment for small children. Or criminals.

My favourite thing from the National Archeological Museum (Iran flavour) was the salt man. It seems that about 1700 years ago a guy got in a fight with another guy and bashed him in the face with some kind of mace, killing – or at least severely wounding him. To cover the crime, the basher threw the body down a salt mine. The preserving nature of salt dried the body out and kept in in fairly good nick, until someone found it in the winter of 1993. Carbon 14 dating provided the age of the corpse and DNA testing gave the interesting (although somewhat useless) information that he is blood type B+. His head and boot (with leg still inside it) are on display in the museum, and in my pictures below.

Enjoy!