By Gilad Shtern
Archeologist Alla Nagorsky holding the egg.
In the latest installment in the eternal debate over which came first, an intact chicken egg dating from roughly 1021 CE was discovered in Yavne, a city in central Israel, archaeologists announced Wednesday.
Found protected in a cesspit, the gem was discovered by Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists during their excavation of Yavne as part of an urban expansion project in the city.
Dr. Lee Perry Gal, a leading expert on poultry in the ancient world, explained the rare nature of the find.
“Eggshell fragments are known from earlier periods, for example in the City of David and at Caesarea and Apollonia, but due to the eggs’ fragile shells, hardly any whole chicken eggs have been preserved. Even at the global level, this is an extremely rare find,” she said. “In archaeological digs, we occasionally find ancient ostrich eggs, whose thicker shells preserve them intact.”
While excavating an ancient site in Yavne that archeologists have dated to about 1,000 years ago, they were astonished to find an unbroken chicken’s egg. “Eggshell fragments are known from earlier periods, for example in the City of David and at Caesarea and Apollonia, but due to the eggs’ fragile shells,
Maya Margit 06/09/2021
In a very rare find, Israeli archaeologists have unearthed a 1,000-year-old intact chicken egg in the central city of Yavne.
Archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) were in the midst of conducting excavations on an ancient cesspit dating back to the Islamic period, or roughly the 10th century, when they stumbled across the exciting discovery.
Archeologist Alla Nagorsky, the IAA’s excavation director at the site, told The Media Line that she was stunned when she realized what they had found.
“The first thing I said was wow,” Nagorsky recounted. “I’ve been digging for nearly 40 years and I’ve never seen a whole chicken egg before. Eggs are so fragile that it is nearly impossible to find them intact.”
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The chicken egg, which measures about 6 centimeters, was discovered perfectly persevered in human feces that was inside an ancient cesspit that dates to the Byzantine period.