Shoub district of Sana'a over a week ago."Efforts are underway to study the recent discovery of the mummy in Shoub which is now in the National Museum in Sana'a," said Muhannad Al-Sayani, director of Sana'a office of the General Organization for Antiquities and Museums (GOAM). "A number of years ago we found 13 mummies in the same area," he added. "Only one was in good condition, while the others were damaged."A team of French experts from the University of Poitiers and Museum of Anthropology in France met with the Yemeni antiquity organization to discuss the recent discovery and to sign an agreement to work jointly towards preserving the mummy.A French mummy expert will arrive in Yemen on February 20 to study the latest find and to examine the mummies in Sana'a University and The National Museum."The GOAM is working towards converting the Al-Tawelah Museum in Al-Mahwit into a National Center for Mummies," said Chairman of GOAM Abdullah Ba Wazir.The Yemeni-French agreement will include sending GOAM staff to France to receive training in mummy conservation, according to Ba Wazir.A number of mummies have been discovered over the past years in a number of locations including Al-Mahwit, Thamar, Marib and Shabwah. "The museum needs some special equipment to correctly preserve and display the mummies. We plan to send samples of mummies, which are often found in stone graves, to France to be examined to find out the materials and exact methods the ancient Yemenis used in mummification, including embalming," Ba Wazir added.The minister of culture has ordered a team of archaeologists to go to the site and start excavations from the beginning of next week. The mummy will be registered, lifted and transported to a safe place, according to Al-Sayani. An American expedition was the first to find samples of mummies in Marib in 1951-1952 in the graveyard of the Awam Temple. In 1983, a Yemeni archeology expedition found 26 mummies in Shibam Al-Gharas, but only one of them has survived. Other mummies were discovered in the mountain of Al-Noman in Al-Mahwit in 1991 and in Bani Matar in 1994. In Dhamar, archeologists found an ancient child mummy.Most of the mummies discovered in Yemen have yet to be studied. Many of them have been waiting in museums storehouses for years for the opening of the mummy's center at Al-Taweelah Museum in Al-Mahweet.