Moscow - Residents of Russia's Altai region say that a 25-century-old mummy that was dug up 11 years ago is causing earthquakes in their corner of Siberia and have demanded that it be reburied.
"We must calm people down and bury the Altai Princess," which is being studied by researchers at an institute 600km away, said Aulkhan Jatkambayev, the administration chief in the area where the mummy was discovered.
"We are having tremors two or three times a week, sometimes measuring up to four (on the Richter scale). People think this will go on as long as the Princess' spirit is not allowed to rest in peace," Jatkambayev said.
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Jatkambayev said he wrote a letter to the Altai authorities, asking that the mummy be buried.
'Burying it is out of the question' The 25-century-old Altai Princess was discovered on the Ukok plateau, in the South Siberian republic of Altai, and was then sent to the Archaeological and Ethnographic Institute of Novosibirsk.
The mummy is that of a girl bearing tattoos on one arm and believed to have belonged to an aristocratic family.
It has been exceptionally well preserved, as it was buried deep in frozen earth typical for this region. Six horses, saddled and bridled, were buried together with her.
The controversy surrounding the mummy has reached such proportions that even some ethnographers are of a split mind.
"This is a very painful issue. Altai's native people worry about their forbear. The Princess must return to us," said the director of Altai's capital Gorno-Altaisk's ethnographic museum, Rima Yerkinova.
However, Yerkinova does not want the mummy to be buried, saying it should instead be exhibited in her museum, where a mausoleum could be built for the Princess, thanks to 2-million rubles (about R450) already paid in advance by the local authorities.
"We shall put (the Princess) in a glass sarcophagus, so that everybody can come and bow before her," Erkinova said.
But archaeologists who are studying the Princess in Novosibirsk so far refuse to send her back, arguing that they are not yet done with examining the rare find.
And even when they are through with their work, there are limits to what they are prepared to concede, said archaeologist Vyacheslav Molodin.
"We are prepared to discuss the mummy's possible transfer to the museum, but burying it is out of the question," the Novosibirsk Ethnographic Institute's Molodin told the Izvestya daily.
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