Salt Men is a name given to the six mummies discovered in winter in the Chahrabad salt mine in Zanjan province. Among them is the body of a woman and a teenage boy.  A number of salt men have been badly damaged by the bulldozer s continued mining work.  The mine was stopped in year 6 and the sixth man s body was left untouched due to a lack of facilities to maintain it. Among the salt men found, three salt men are from the Achaemenid period (ca. 400 BC) and two other salt men are from the late Sassanid era (ca. 200 to 600 AC). Salt men are some of the most valuable objects discovered in the world that have so far failed to be priced.

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The corpse was found in the middle of one of the mine tunnels, about 45 meters long. Exploration has begun in the area since 1996. Excavations also found a leg inside a leather boot, three knives, a trouser, a silver object, a stone hook, pieces of leather rope, a saber, a walnut, a piece of pottery, and several pieces of imprinted cloth and crushed bone. [Archaeologists have said about the appearance of the figure that the man was probably a salt from the nobility and princes class because of the jewels and jewelry that belonged to this class were found on his clothing, and they also hypothesized that he was either fleeing to the cave, or escaped from battle in the field and took refuge in the cave and died there, and the termites devoured his body, which covered with salt.

After the discovery of the second mummy s body in 2004, a systematic exploration began; and over the next six years, four more mummies were discovered, bringing the total number of mummies to six. In the winter of 2007, the miners encountered a half-corpse while digging and extracting salt from mines in the area. The body had a long beard and hair and a ring of gold in the left ear.

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