Archeologists digging near the central Israeli city of Yavne have uncovered the most delicate of artifacts in the remains of an ancient cesspool. Inside the 1,000-year-old cesspool, they were surprised to find an apparently intact hen’s egg, dating all the way back to the Byzantine period, according to daily Haaretz.
Dr. Lee Perry Gal, a poultry expert at the Israel Antiquities Authority, explained how extraordinary it was to find the egg: “Eggshell fragments are known from earlier periods, for example in the City of David, Caesarea and Apollonia, but due to the fragility of the eggs, almost no whole hen eggs have been preserved. Even on a global level, this is an extremely rare find.”
One of the archeologists excavating the site, Alla Nagorsky, credited the cesspool with the survival of the 1,000-year-old egg all these years, explaining that it was the soft human waste that preserved it. Yet after surviving for a millennium in a toilet, a small crack formed at the bottom of the egg as the scientists extracted it from the pit, as French monthly magazine GEO reports, preventing it from making it back to the lab fully intact. Only a portion of the yolk was salvageable, which scientists will use for future DNA analysis — but still leaving unanswered the eternal question: which came first, the chicken or the egg … or that awful smell from the cesspool?
