(14) _Birds._--As to birds, it is doubtful whether they had any domesticated ones before the Babylonian Exile. A rude picture of an ostrich painted on a potsherd was found at Gezer, as well as some painted fragments of ostrich-egg shell. The ostrich is mentioned in the Old Testament (Job 39:13; Lam. 4:3), but as a wild bird. The Palestinians knew it as a bird that might be hunted. They sometimes gathered the eggs of wild birds to eat (Deut. 22:6; Isa. 10:14). These were, perhaps, sometimes ostrich-eggs. The modern Arabs make a kind of omelette of ostrich-eggs. The ostrich was certainly not a domestic bird. At Gezer, too, a clay bird was found, or, rather, a small jar made in the form of a bird. The object was so realistic that holes were left in the clay wings for the insertion of feathers; (Fig. 93). The bird bears some resemblance to a duck, figures of which were found at Megiddo,[166] but the duck may have been wild. One clay head of a goose or swan was also found, but had the bird been domesticated there would probably have been more traces of it. (15) _Hens._--The one domestic bird that can be traced in Palestine is the hen, and hens were not introduced until after the Exile. Hens seem to have been first domesticated in India. They are not mentioned in the Rig Veda, but the Aryans seem to have come into contact with them when they settled in the valley of the Ganges about 1000 B. C. The Yajur and Atharva Vedas mention the cock. The hen is a domesticated Bankiva fowl, which also exists in a wild state in India. From India the hen was domesticated eastward to China, and westward to Persia. There is a possible picture of a cock on a sculpture of Sennacherib, which would indicate that the bird was known in Assyria at the beginning of the seventh century before Christ. Another is pictured on some Babylonian gems from the time of Nabuna’id, about 550 B. C. Pictures of cocks, three of them somewhat doubtful, are found on Babylonian seals of the Persian period.[167] The domesticated hen, traveling by way of the Black Sea, reached Asia Minor as early as the eighth century B. C.[168]