Saqqara Bird Saqqara Bird The Saqqara Bird is a bird-shaped artifact made of sycamore wood, discovered during the 1898 excavation of the Pa-di-Imen tomb in Saqqara, Egypt. It has been dated to approximately 200 BCE, and is now housed in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo. The Saqqara Bird has a wingspan of and weighs . Its function is not understood because of a lack of period documentation. Some think the Saqqara Bird may be a ceremonial object because the falcon, the bird after which the Saqqara Bird is modeled, is the form most commonly used to represent several of the
Saqqara Bird showing those boats are found in the Temple of Khonsu at Karnak and date to the late New Kingdom. Some have suggested that the Saqqara Bird may represent evidence that knowledge of the principles of aviation existed many centuries before such are generally believed to have first been discovered. Egyptian physician, archaeologist, parapsychologist and dowser Khalil Messiha has speculated that the ancient Egyptians developed the first aircraft. He wrote that it "represents a diminutive of an original monoplane still present in Saqqara." He also claimed that the Saqqara Bird could function as a glider if it had a horizontal tailplane,