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Ostrich Egg-Shell Cups of Mesopotamia, Ostrich in Ancient, Modern Times (1926)


A cultural history of ostrich eggs and the birds that lay them.

In the early 1920s, British archaeological excavator Ernest Mackay unearthed an egg at the Sumerian cemetery of Kish, in modern-day Iraq’s Babil Governate. Laufer begins his treatise with an observation: these eggs were everywhere in the ancient world, found in the prehistoric tombs of Mycenae, Etruria, Latium, Carthage, and Egypt. Chinese speakers in the Tang dynasty called ostriches “camel birds”, and reported that East Africans fed their flocks with red-hot copper.

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