For more details about these primary source excerpts see Primary Source Bazaar Blog Post “What Amazing Egyptian Chicken Hatcheries Can Tell about Perceptions of Other Places”
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Eggs are hatched by the incubation of the mother-bird. In some cases, as in Egypt, they are hatched spontaneously in the ground, by being buried in dung heaps. A story is told of a drunkard in Syracuse, how he used to put eggs into the ground under his rush-mat and to keep on drinking until he hatched them. Instances have occurred of eggs being deposited in warm vessels and getting hatched spontaneously.1
___________________________________________
Diodorus Siculus (c. 80 – 20 BC)2
Diodorus Siculus was a Greek historian who wrote forty books of myths, legends and the usual customs of foreign people. Only Books I–V (Egyptians, Assyrians, Ethiopians, Greeks) and Books XI–XX (Greek history 480–302 BCE); and fragments of the remaining books have survived.
The most astonishing fact is that, by reason of their unusual application to such matters, the men [in Egypt] who have charge of poultry and geese, in addition to producing them in the natural way known to all mankind, raise them by their own hands, by virtue of a skill peculiar to them, in numbers beyond telling; for they do not use the birds for hatching the eggs, but, in effecting this themselves artificially by their own wit and skill in an astounding manner, they are not surpassed by the operations of nature.
_________________________________________
Pliny the Elder (23 – 79 AD)3
Pliny the Elder was a Roman author and military commander in the Early Roman Empire. Natural History, the only work by Pliny to survive, was an encyclopedia of 37 books covering what was known about the natural sciences and technology of the time. The excerpt below demonstrates that at least some ancient people knew that egg incubation was not magic, but a process requiring heat.
And, what is even more singular still, eggs can be hatched also by a human being. Julia Augusta, when pregnant in her early youth of Tiberius Caesar, by Nero, was particularly desirous that her offspring should be a son. She employed the following mode of divination, which was then much in use among young women. She carried an egg in her bosom, taking care, whenever she was obliged to put it down, to give it to her nurse to warm in her own, that there might be no interruption in the heat. It is stated that the result promised by this mode of augury (predicting the future) was not falsified.
It was perhaps from this circumstance, that the modern invention took its rise, of placing eggs in a warm spot and covering them with chaff, the heat being maintained by a moderate fire, while in the meantime a man is employed in turning them. By the adoption of this plan, the young, all of them, break the shell on a stated day.
______________________________________________
Pilgrimage Account of Friar Simon Fitzsimons, 1320s4
Franciscan Friar Simon Fitzsimons journeyed from Ireland, through London, Canterbury, Paris, to Venice, where he and his companions took a ship to Alexandria, Egypt. They toured the sites around Cairo, and then traveled overland through the desert to Jerusalem.
Also in Cairo, outside the Gate and almost immediately to the right . . . there is a long narrow house in which chickens are generated by fire from hen eggs, without cocks and hens, and in such numbers that they cannot be numbered. In that house, on both sides the earth is raised to the height of an altar, and extended the whole length of the house, in which there are artificial ovens or furnaces, in which they place innumerable eggs, and around them continually night and day are fed fires for twenty-two days, usually, or twenty-three, so that all of these eggs emit chickens. They are so numerous that they are sold by the weight, like wheat, instead of individual. We saw, in public, people who sold hens and chicks, some of whom according to our estimation, had two or three thousand which they fed from the grain that fell from passing loaded camels.
______________________________________________
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, late 14th century5
There is also, in the city of Cairo, a public building full of holes – as it were, hen’s nests; and the women of the country bring thither hen and duck and goose eggs, and put them in the nests. And certain persons are employed to look after that building and to cover the eggs with warm horse dung. And through the heat of the horse dung the eggs hatch birds without the brooding of a hen or any other bird. And at the end of three or four weeks the women who brought the eggs come and take away the birds and rear the according to the custom of the country. And in this way is all the country stocked with these kinds of birds. And they do this in winter as well as in summer.
_____________________________________
The Domestic Habits of Birds by James Rennie (1833)6
Modern travelers, who mention the art as practiced in Egypt, are very deficient in their details; . . . but Father Sicard informs us that it is kept a secret even in Egypt, and is only known to the inhabitants of the village of Berme, and a few adjoining places in the Delta, who leave it as an heirloom to their children, forbidding them to impart it to strangers. . . . The grade secret is the manner of causing the eggs to be warmed that the chickens may be . . .hatched.
_____________________________________
Excerpt from Vere Monro’s travel account A Summer Ramble in Syria with a Tartar Trip from Aleppo to Stamboul (1835)7
Mansoura . . . once ranked among the largest town of the Delta, and has been famed for . . . success in hatching chickens; for (ancient Roman) Vopsicus related that Adrian inveighed against the Egyptians with this sarcasm: “I wish them no great curse than that they may feed on their own chickens, which are hatched in a manner that I shall not tell.” The chicken ovens were made of dung, and the eggs hatched by the heat of the sun, and hot putrid vapour: in the present day fire is applied.
_____________________________
Excursions to Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Balbec from the United States (1836) by George Jones, an American naval chaplain8
As we sailed along, our attention was very often drawn to the houses for hatching chickens, one or more which may be seen in each of their villages. They are formed by taking a number of pots, of the capacity of about a gallon, contracted at the neck, which is turned toward the exterior. About fifty or sixty of these are built up with bricks and mud into an edifice like an elongated bee-hive, twelve or fifteen feet in height. The eggs are small and the fowls are diminutive, but of a very pleasant flavor.
Opposite to Old Cairo, as I have elsewhere remarked, is the village of Ghizeh, from which the largest Pyramids, which we were now about to visit, take their distinctive name; Ghizeh is celebrated also for its ovens for hatching chickens.
About the Header Image: From Royal 2 B VII; Psalter (‘The Queen Mary Psalter’); England (London/Westminster or East Anglia?); between 1310 and 1320. Courtesy of the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.
Footnotes
- Aristotle, The History of Animals, Book VI, Written 350 B.C.E, Translated by D’Arcy WentworthThompson,http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.6.vi.html
- Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, 1.74 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/home.html From Loeb Classical Library, translated by Charles Henry Oldfather (Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933-67) 257.
- The Natural History. Pliny the Elder. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855. Book 10, Chapter 76 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plin.+Nat.+10.76&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137
- Eugene Hoade, Western Pilgrims. (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1952, 1970), 35.
- The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, edited by A. W Pollard, London: Macmillan and Co. Limited and New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900
- James Rennie, The Domestic Habits of Birds, 1833, https://archive.org/stream/domestichabitsb01renngoog#page/n147/mode/2up
- Vere Monro, A Summer Ramble in Syria with a Tartar Trip from Aleppo to Stamboul, Vol. 1 London: Richard Bentley, 1835), 24, https://play.google.com/books/reader?printsec=frontcover&output=reader&id=jlFCAAAAcAAJ&pg=GBS.PA24
- George Jones, Excursions to Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Balbec from the United States (New York: Van Nostrand and Dwight, 1836), 28, 86. https://archive.org/details/excursionstocai00jonegoog