Sardis, an ancient city in modern-day Turkey, has been the site of archeological expeditions since 1910 and is still churning out new finds today.
But this past July archaeologists working at the site found something particularly unusual: 2,000-year-old eggs, likely meant to bless the house as part of a purification ritual.
Burying items in homes as a ritual isn’t itself an unusual practice; it’s a common tradition throughout the Mediterranean and Near East, Nick Cahill, director of the Sardis expedition, told National Geographic.
But finding delicate eggs is another story.
One egg was smashed, the other whole, and both were filled with dirt. Amazingly, a team of conservators, led by Jennifer Kim, were able to excavate one eggshell intact, except for a small, already-existing hole in the side.
This perforation was likely intentional and perhaps served to empty out the contents of the offering to avoid rot, said William Bruce, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who found the eggs.
Eggs have been found at the site once before, during the first Sardis expedition in 1911, but they were given little attention.
However, archaeologists at the time had described the exact type of small perforation observed in the new findings, which led today’s researchers to conclude that they were on to something.
“[It] was kind of a smoking gun,” said Bruce. Furthermore, the old research described the exact same combination of items found in the pots: coins, implements, and, yes, eggs—suggesting it wasn’t a coincidence.
The burning question, of course, is exactly why eggs were used in this way in Sardis.
“Often when structures were rebuilt, they would put a ritual deposit into the wall or floor,” said Bruce. Their research was detailed recently in a presentation by Bruce’s colleague Elizabeth DeRidder Raubolt at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in New Orleans.
“In Greece you find a lot of these type of deposits, where they put something in the walls as a dedication along the lines of ‘bless this house.’” This was likely to ensure purity, fertility, and abundance, says Bruce.
It’s like our ritual of cracking a bottle of champagne against the side of a ship—except in this case it’s poking an egg.
Some further detective work revealed that several contemporary Roman thinkers, including Ovid, wrote of the purifying properties of eggs, and that the satirist Juvenal even mentioned egg rituals in connection with the revered goddess Cybele.
“These deposits could have been rituals to purify the house in part of a reconstruction with the blessing of one of Sardis’s most ancient deities,” said Bruce.
Interestingly, Bruce said he knows of no other site where such purification rituals involved the use of eggs, meaning it could be a practice unique to Sardis.
But the necessary research is still in its infancy, and he warned that nothing is certain at this point. Archaeological finds take time to generate hypotheses and those ideas longer still to ferment into solid theories.
Now it’s just a matter of seeing what other bounty Sardis offers up with its side of eggs.