The Saqqara Bird is a wooden birdlike artifact discovered during the 1891 excavation of the Pa-di-Imen tomb in Saqqara, Egypt. It dates to at least 200 BC and is now housed in the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, Egypt. It has a wingspan of 7.2 inches and weighs 39.120 grams.
Since the 5.6-inch long object closely resembles a model airplane, it has led Egyptologist Khalil Messiha and others to speculate that the Egyptians developed the first aircraft. Messiha, who was the first to argue that the model did not represent a bird, wrote in 1983 that it "represents a diminutive of an original monoplane still present in Saqqara." He also claimed that the artifact could function as a glider if it had a tailplane, which he "suppose[s] was lost," and that the Egyptians often placed representations of their technology in their tombs.
Michael Frenchman, likewise, concluded that "the find is a scale model of a full-sized flying machine of some kind." According to the Augusta Chronicle, "a committee [of Egypt's Ministry of Culture] ... concluded that the 7-inch-long model ... seemed to incorporate principles of aircraft design that had taken modern engineers decades of experimentation to discover and perfect."
After testing a replica of the Saqquara bird, Martin Gregorie notes that: "...the Saqqara Bird never flew. It is totally unstable without a tailplane... Even after a tailplane was fitted the glide performance was disappointing." He instead concludes that "the Saqqara Bird was probably made as a child's toy or a weather vane."
