Will Mandela's funeral be the biggest in history?

                      Chaos ensued after Khomeini's body was taken through the streets of Tehran

Few events can have provided quite so much political stardust as the Nelson Mandela memorial service, where 52 presidents and 16 prime ministers gathered inside Soccer City to pay their respects.

Although the stadium had empty seats, a live broadcast was beamed into three other venues, and there were more than 100 public viewing areas across the country. Between now and Mandela's burial on Sunday, thousands will line the streets to see his coffin pass through Pretoria.
Although crowd estimates should always be treated with caution, the largest funeral attendance in history is widely thought to have happened in 1969 when 15 million people reportedly took to the streets of Chennai for CN Annadurai, the former chief minister of Tamil Nadu

His popularity was partly due to his brilliance as a writer and speaker, says Tamil expert MSS Pandian, and the fact he founded a separate linguistic identity for the Tamils by rejecting Hindi as the national language.

According to the Guinness World of Records, the highest percentage of mourners in any country came 20 years later, when one in six Iranians - about 10m - witnessed the coffin of Ayatollah Khomeini being carried through Tehran, amid chaotic scenes in which several were crushed to death.