Featured on PDR in the collection Ostrich Egg-Shell Cups of Mesopotamia and the Ostrich in Ancient and Modern Times (1926)

In the early 1920s, British archaeological excavator Ernest Mackay unearthed an egg at the Sumerian cemetery of Kish, in modern-day Iraq’s Babil Governate. One third of its top had been cut away, the shell roughly smoothed with a primitive sander. It seemed to serve as a kind of drinking cup. The bird, his team had learned, was called gir-gid-da (“the long-legged bird”) or gam-gam (“the benefactor”). As the Kish expedition continued, more shards of ostrich shells were found. This is when the German anthropologist and sinologist Berthold Laufer (1874–1934) took notice.