Archaeologists are closer to cracking the mystery of an ancient salt mine which houses the mummified remains of miners.
The ‘Saltmen’ in the Chehrābād salt mine of Douzlākh, Iran, date back to Persia’s Achaemenid Dynasty from 550 to 330 BC. Miners were “exceptionally” preserved after being buried alive, still frozen in their dying positions with some ‘screaming’.
Of the eight mummified Saltmen unearthed, most date back to the age of the Achaemenid empire, which stretched from Egypt to the Indus River Valley, in areas that are now part of Pakistan and India.
“In the case of the salt mummies,” as paleo-pathologist Dr Lena Öhrström and her co-authors put it, “the mummification process was induced by salt.”
The moisture-absorbing effect of the mine’s salt deposits, according to the University of Zurich’s Mummy Studies Group, dehydrated the Saltmen until they were “naturally” mummified.
“The resulting dehydration inhibits bacterial growth and arrests decomposition,” Dr Öhrström and her team explained in their 2021 study for the journal PLoS One.
But a new study suggests that the first people to mine the region’s salt may date nearly over four thousand years prior, based on settlements unearthed nearby.
The researchers pulled together data from 18 nearby archaeological dig sites, dating “from prehistory to the Islamic period”, hoping to determine how far back in human history salt mining and extraction first began.
They are convinced that the easily accessible and mineable salt mountain in Douzlākh would have had a central role in the economy of rural communities.
However, despite the settlements being found, some of which date back to 5,000 BC, there is little evidence to prove they were mining salt.
Due to the lack of evidence, they have been left to theorise, asking: “Does the lack of evidence relate to a type of underground exploitation that is different from surface salt collection?
“Or, does it relate to the lack of administrative and governance structures for the exploitation of salt?”