It is very common to find images of birds in the art of Ancient Egypt. We see them in paintings and sculptures with species of all kinds, from the ducks that were hunted in the Nile to the ibis that contributed its head to the god Toth, to the vulture that finished off the white crown of the high kingdom representing Nejbet, through the falcon associated with Horus, who was embodied in the pharaoh. Let's stay with the latter because it seems to be the one embodied in one of the most unusual pieces of pharaonic art:the so-called Bird of Saqqara .
Also known as Saqqara Glider because its shapes are quite reminiscent of those of an airplane, something that caused some pseudoscientific speculation, with the unclassifiable Khalil Messiha at the head, insisting that it was a model of a monoplane demonstrating that the Egyptians had managed to conquer the sky. Messiha, professor of artistic anatomy (in reality he presents himself as an archaeologist, doctor, parapsychologist, dowser and whatever comes to mind), was also a fan of model airplanes and wanted to give the piece a twist.
Thus, he claimed to have discovered an inscription on it that other archaeologists did not see -a curious thing considering that the object measures 14 centimeters- and that said Pa-di-Amón , translatable as "Amun's gift". This was a local god, Theban to be exact, who after the Hyksos invasion achieved national importance by assimilating himself to Ra and becoming the patron of the most powerful clerical class in the country. Amon was considered the father of the winds and in his iconography he appears with two large vertical feathers on his head.
The fact is that Messiha concluded that those words, together with the fact that the bird had no legs and that the tail was vertical instead of horizontal, showed that it was not intended to be a bird but a glider. Consequently, he embarked on the task of building a scale model six times larger with the help of an aeronautical engineer who happened to be his brother. He assured that he made it fly, although nobody saw it and he also had to add a horizontal stabilizer to the lower part of the tail, which the original lacks -according to him because it was lost, although there is no sign of it- because if not the device would fall.
All this happened in 1969, a time when, more or less, the door was opened for that type of songs that would make a killing in the seventies. In fact, Messiha had its moment of glory in 1972, when the Egyptian authorities, willing to give wind to the inevitable patriotic nationalism that being a pioneer of aviation four thousand years ahead of time meant for the country, paid unheard-of ears to the theory and organized an exhibition of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo with the collaboration of the Ministries of Education and Air:the theme was model aircraft in Ancient Egypt, exhibiting the Bird of Saqqara along with a dozen other similar pieces. The sample caused stupor in the scientific community that, of course, did not want to endorse it.
Almost half a century later, that episode remains as one more bizarre pseudoscience and no archaeologist maintains something remotely similar -although Messilha has continued to exploit the subject-, among other things because, and having to say it is something grotesque in itself, it is not Has ever found an ancient Egyptian aircraft. It is true that, on this scale, the Saqqara Bird has good qualities for flight, which has led some researchers to suggest that it could be a kind of boomerang for hunting waterfowl, a common tool at the time.
It measures 14 centimeters in length by 18 in wingspan, with the wings slightly curved downwards and one longer than the other (7.7 centimeters compared to 7.6), which, combined with its unusual vertical tail, would make it easier to turn and return. into the thrower's hands. Although not all boomerangs return to the hands of their owner (those that do were not used in hunting but in rituals), it is a type of universal instrument that already appears in Prehistory -some have been found in Atapuerca- and It was used for both hunting and war activities. In the tomb of Tutankhamun, without going any further, there were several copies.
In that same sense, for some time now the theories about the Bird of Saqqara have been refined. Due to its morphology and aerodynamics it looks like a falcon and, taking into account that this animal was associated with divinities (such as the aforementioned Horus but also with Ra-Horajty, the manifestation of the former during the dawn), we could consider it a ceremonial object. There is not and probably will not be agreement on whether or not he took to the air.
One of the latest and most accepted proposals is that the piece was placed on the upper end of the masts of the sacred boats used in the Opet festival, which was celebrated annually during the second month of the flood in honor of Amun-Ra and during which the priests, in procession, carried the aforementioned boats on their shoulders along the avenue that connects the temples of Karnak and Luxor. It ended with the transfusion of vital energy from Amón-Min to Amón-Ra to, by parallelism, affect a symbolic rebirth of the pharaoh.
The reason for placing the figure on top of the poles would be to use it as a weathervane and, in fact, in the Khonsu temple (Karnak) there are reliefs showing ships crowned like this, such as those of Ramses III, Herihor and Mery-Amón. Something criticized by the ineffable Messiha, who says that the hole for the insertion is not original and was made by the officials of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to string it on a stick. There are also those who consider that the Bird of Saqqara was a simple children's toy for a well-to-do child.
The fact is that the context of its discovery does not clarify much either:the French archaeologist Victor Loret found it in 1898 inside a burial site in the Saqqara necropolis, where the famous Step Pyramid is located, but little else is known about it. tomb and bird. The data only says that it is made of sycamore wood, originally polychrome to resemble a falcon (white body with two red stripes, lapis lazuli eyes, gold wing feathers), that it weighs just over 39 grams and that it is dated around to the year 200 BC, that is, already in the Ptolemaic period.
If anyone is curious to see it up close, it is exhibited in room 22 of the museum, cataloged with number 6,347; the same place where it went unnoticed for decades, because it was surrounded by other pieces in the shape of a bird, until that day in 1969 it caught Messiha's attention.