They’re so fragile… who would think they could last this long? It was found in Israel. This is the egg that remained intact for a thousand years.
“Eggs rarely survive for long in supermarket cartons. It’s amazing to think of this. A thousand-year-old find,” said archaeologist Alla Nagorsky. She is the director of the excavation in the city of Yavne. That’s where the discovery was made.
Preserved by chance
Nagorsky says: “It is evidently due to the conditions in which it lay for centuries. It was nestled in a cesspool. And it contains soft human debris which in turn preserved it.”
The chicken egg was inside a domestic sewage pit. It dates back to the Islamic period. How did they know how to date it? And they also found three dolls made of bone. They are typical of the Abbasid period from the seventh to the eleventh century.
Lee Perry Gal is an archaeologist with expertise in birds. She explained that “eggshell fragments are also known from earlier periods. For example, at the city of David and at Caesarea and Apollonia. But they were never preserved whole. Ancient ostrich eggs are more commonly found. Their shells are harder. But a hen’s egg is extraordinary.
Almost empty
How could it have lasted so long? It happens to have spent centuries wrapped in soft excrement. It provided the right anaerobic conditions. And a millennium later, a group of archaeologists found it.
The egg that remained intact for a thousand years was found almost empty. It was restored in a laboratory. “Unfortunately, it had a small crack at the bottom. Most of the contents had already leaked out. Only part of the yolk remained, which is preserved for future DNA analysis,” they said.
Finding the egg in a latrine isn’t as bad as it sounds. After so long, the waste becomes soil. Happily.
