3 Ways Ancient Egyptian Technology Was Surprisingly Advanced

Next up, let's look at an industry you perhaps have never thought about: egg incubation. If you raise chickens, you can leave the hens to sit on eggs in their nests, or you can collect the eggs and warm them artificially to hatch them on an industrial scale. In the 1700s, travelers to Egypt were stunned by Egyptian egg ovens (or "chicken factories"), and back home, Europeans tried and failed to replicate them using travelers' descriptions. Finally, someone invented an electric incubator at the end of the 19^th century.

Egyptian egg ovens were made of mud, were sometimes shaped like little pyramids, and each of them stored and hatched thousands of eggs. But we're not talking about them here because Egypt invented these in the 1700s, impressing visitors from France. We're talking about them here because they had been using this same technology, unchanged, for thousands of years, and those Enlightenment writers described them with the exact same level of fascination as ancient Greek visitors had back in BC times.

Last thing for today, let's talk about the Suez Canal. Not the one you know of now, which connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas, but the Ancient Suez Canal, which linked the Red Sea to the Nile. We aren't sure just when the Egyptians first carved out this artificial waterway, but it might have been as far back as the 1800s BC. Even a thousand years later (perhaps the real date it started, after earlier attempts failed) would have been pretty early for someone to create their own river 150 feet wide and 100 miles long.

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