"Death By Salt. An archaeological investigation in Persia"is a special exhibition of the Deutsche Bergbau-Museum Bochum, Leibniz Research Museum for Georesources. 

A dead young man, an ancient Persian salt mine and an archaeological excavation -

A dead young man, an ancient Persian salt mine and an archaeological excavation - these are the topics of the special exhibition "Death By Salt. An archaeological investigation in Persia". The exhibition on the ground floor of our special exhibition building DBM+ focuses on the archaeological research work around the salt mine of Chehrābād in present-day Iran. In 1993, Iranian workers found the mummified head of a man there. He is the first of a total of 8 "Salt Men" discovered so far. The oldest is about 2,400 years old. A young man - "Salt Man 4" - also died in a mining accident 2,400 years ago. He was mummified along with his equipment by the salt.

These finds are unique.The "Salt Men" are the only examples of people mummified in salt and preserved to this day. A team of international archaeologists has spent years investigating the lives, work and deaths of miners in ancient Persia.

We show the results in our special exhibition. There you can take a closer look at Salt Man 4 and the Douzlākh salt mountain, where the salt men were found - digital applications such as augmented reality make this possible.

And in the exhibition, "Salt Man 4" is given a name: "Farshid". What did his last day look like? In a graphic novel, we reconstruct the possible last days of young Farshid.

In the digital tour you can visit three exhibition parts:

• The special exhibition "Death by Salt" is located on level 1 of the digital tour.
• On level 2 we present other exciting research projects from Iran: The projects of the Priority Programme (SPP) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) "The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration of Pre-modern Societies." The core focus of all projects is resilience: How did societies or cultures of the Iranian Highlands establish resilient and crisis coping ways of life? 
• And you can visit a joint exhibition of the German Mining Museum Bochum, the Saltmen and Archaeological Museum Zanjan and the National Museum Tehran: "Human Search for Ressources". The exhibition shows the history of human experiences and achievements in mining.

On this homepage you can find out everything about the exhibition - the explosive background, so to speak: The excavation director Prof. Dr. Thomas Stöllner takes you underground,Dr. Natascha Bagherpour Kashani talks about working in and with Iran and Sasan Saidi tells how he came to study art overnight. 

Here you find the film of the opening.

Thomas Stöllner and Susan Zare guide you through the exhibition and the evening. Into their conversation, they weave in greetings and statements from our supporters and sponsors, show impressions from a long-standing research project and take a look behind the scenes of the exhibition together with you.