Israeli archaeologists find whole 1,000-year-old egg

One day a thousand years ago, a chicken in Yavneh laid an egg. That egg was never to hatch, sadly for that chicken’s posterity. For some reason, it wound up in a cesspit in the ancient city’s industrial zone – and there it sat.

Until archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority came along, conducting a salvage excavation in the ancient industrial zone of the central Israeli city ahead of construction, and found it. Seasoned in the extraction of extremely delicate matter, they managed to remove the egg from the cesspit, still perfect.

“We were astonished to find it,” IAA archaeologist Alla Nagorsky, head of this part of the salvage dig, told Haaretz. “From time to time we find fragments of eggshells, but a whole egg is extraordinary.”

The egg had apparently been preserved all these years – never mind cracking, it didn’t decay and rot – because it had been dropped or placed in the toilet, and was encased in soft waste, which created anaerobic conditions.