2,000-year-old mummy found dumped and gutted in the garbage in Yemen, officials say

An ancient mummy was recently found discarded near a dumpster in Yemen, officials said.

The preserved corpse, which is around 2,000 years old, appears to have been cut open by grave robbers before it was left for trash, according to a March 8 statement from the General Organization of Antiquities and Museums.

The mummy was taken to Yemen’s National Museum in Sanaa to be examined and treated for bacterial decay, the Facebook post says.

The finding of the gutted and abandoned mummy triggered outrage in Yemen, according to Arab News.

“My sorrow and rage over the fate of a nation and its people is immense,” the country’s one-time culture minister wrote on Facebook, according to the outlet.

Ancient Yemeni people used a variety of materials in their embalming and burial process, including cactus and henna, a plant-based dye.

Mummified remains were sometimes placed inside the skins of camels or cows.

Yemen, located on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, has been embroiled in a multiparty civil war since 2014, and the country’s population is “enduring the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” according to the United Nations Foundation.

As the war has raged on, some of the country’s mummies have begun to rot amid electrical outages and a shortage of preservative materials, according to a 2017 Reuters report.

This story was originally published March 10, 2023 at 11:55 AM with the headline "2,000-year-old mummy found dumped and gutted in the garbage in Yemen, officials say."