Eggstraordinary Objects
February 2021 | Vol. 9.2
By Tamar Hodos
Ostrich egg painted with four sphinxes. Found in Italy. British Museum 18,500,227.50. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Ostrich egg vessel carved in low relief with warriors in procession. Found in Italy. British Museum 1850,0227.9. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Ostrich egg. Public Domain. (USGS.gov).
The eggs were decorated with ornate carved or painted motifs, and frequently fashioned into vessels with metal fittings to create cups and jugs. They have been found primarily in funerary contexts from Iberia to Mesopotamia. Their widespread distribution, particularly during the first millennium BCE, reflects a shared understanding of what it meant to be rich, as well as the more bespoke significance of eggs in each particular cultural context. This demonstrates the balance between shared practices and localised differences between groups connected in globalisation settings.
Most previous scholarship on the eggs focused on asking who decorated them. Suggestions were based upon stylistic similarity to other contemporary worked media, such as carved ivory. This resulted in a simple assumption that style is the same as ethnic identity. What is problematic, particularly for the first millennium BCE, is that we know that craftsmen were mobile, and some of them worked for foreign rulers and elite patrons.
A decorated egg from the Isis Tomb, Vulci, Italy. © Tamar Hodos, University of Bristol (with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum).
Dr. A. Fletcher examining an ostrich egg. Photo courtesy of the author.
What we learned was that the entire system of decorated ostrich egg production was much more complicated than we had imagined! It turns out that just because you could source an ostrich egg locally, it does not necessarily mean that you did. Mediterranean ostriches were indigenous to the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Using a variety of isotopic indicators, we were able to distinguish eggs laid in different climatic zones (cooler, wetter vs. hotter, drier).
North African Ostrich. Photo by MathKnight CC By-SA.
What was most surprising to us was that sites in both zones had eggs from the other zone as well as their own. This raises new questions, such as, ”Were the unworked eggs themselves traded?” and, “Did eggs from different areas have different perceived values?” I cannot help but wonder if it is similar to brown vs. white chicken eggs today: there is no nutritional or taste difference between them. The colour depends upon the ear feather and lobe colour of the breed, believe it or not. Yet in regions where white eggs are predominant, brown eggs are more expensive, and vice versa. The “value” difference is entirely of our own social making.
We also believe that the ancient ostrich eggs were sourced from the wild, rather than from captive birds, despite evidence of ostriches being kept successfully in captivity in some places during this period. This is based upon isotopic data that reflects what the laying bird consumed during ovulation, as well as lines visible only via the scanning electron microscope that maybe derived from environmental stress, rather than polishing or decorating techniques, which we could also distinguish.
Close up of incised portion. © Tamar Hodos, University of Bristol (with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum).
Incisions on interior of an egg from Naukratis, Egypt. © Tamar Hodos, University of Bristol (with the permission of the Trustees of the British Museum).
This means that there had to be trackers, who had to find nest sites and steal eggs by one means or another. Ostrich nests are difficult to spot because they are dug into the ground amid grasses such that they are invisible from across the landscape. The female’s coloring further camouflages the site during the day, when she incubates the eggs; the male’s coloring does the same at night, when he keeps the eggs warm. An ostrich will lay its head flat if it senses a predator, which is the origin of the notion that ostriches bury their heads in the sand. But do not take that as passiveness: the birds can kill with a single kick. The Assyrians used imagery of the lashing-out ostrich as a dangerous beast to promote belief in the king’s strength and might.
Acquiring eggs entailed risk to the tracker. Firstly, it could take days to find nest sites, since a male ostrich’s territory may extend up to 20km2, and nest locations seem to have no relation to nest sites from previous seasons within a territory. Secondly, other predators equally dangerous to humans inhabited the same landscapes as the ostriches. So even if the tracker chose to kill an ostrich rather than merely steal its eggs, the bird itself was not the only threat.
We also learned that an egg needs to dry out naturally for an extended period of time after emptying before the shell is suitable for carving. The eggs therefore needed to be stored safely somewhere. This has economic implications, since storage necessitates a long-term investment in producing the finished product. No doubt this added to an egg’s luxury value as much as the fact that it was risky to acquire in the first place.
Only once an egg was suitably dried could those highly skilled craftsmen undertake their decoration. But was the egg decorator the same person who then added the metal rim and spout to turn the decorated egg into a jug? We can see the sequence of working on the eggshells themselves, such as where the motif has been smoothed away in preparation for a spout. We assume a degree of craft specialisation, since metalworking requires very different skill sets, and working environments, than egg carving and painting. No one has previously delved down into the making of these artefacts to consider these aspects of their production, however.
Finally, what does it mean when a deceased Etruscan king in Italy was interred with a decorated ostrich egg? Or a Phoenician residing in Spain? How do those meanings overlap and differ? As the eggs were imports to both regions, what does this tell us about the varieties of socio-cultural and economic connections between ostrich egg using cultures?
The ostrich egg study used the mobility of objects to learn about the variety of people involved in production and exchange in the past, as well as shared and divergent social practices of materials in common between groups. But its relevance does not lie just in learning more about the ancient world. This approach is applicable to contemporary society because of our own social relationships with the material world.
Today, the same object may concurrently have overlapping and different social or symbolic meanings for diverse populations, while its production and distribution connects people in complex ways across time and place. Understanding the relationships between our social lives and material worlds helps us foster better relationships with one another, especially with regard to social and cultural differences. Objects ‘belong’ to many more than just their final consumers. Luxuries extend across the full spectrum of society.
Tamar Hodos is Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol.
How to cite this article:
Hodos, T. 2021. “Eggstraordinary Objects.” The Ancient Near East Today 9.2. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/eggstraordinary-objects/.
Want to learn more?
Understanding Trade and Power in Early Egypt: A Geopolitical Approach
Post a comment