Painting Eggs
Many years ago I saw a post with a picture of an egg decorating robot on Facebook. It showed a robot made of LEGO pieces drawing lines and patterns on eggs. As a LEGO enthusiast, I told myself it would be fun to build one of my own next spring. Like many other plans, this one stayed in a small drawer in the back of my mind and gathered dust for years.
I grew up decorating eggs every year as a tradition. Every spring my family would drive about five hours to my aunt’s vacation home. We would sit around her large table in the living room and my cousins and I would each get an egg or two and we would get creative painting our eggs with watercolors, crayons or markers. When we were school-age, finding these supplies was trivial. One year though when I was older nobody had the presence of mind to pack coloring supplies so we ended up decorating our eggs with nail polish, lipstick and eyeliners.
Although many people in the western world associate egg painting with Easter, decorating eggs is a more ancient practice shared among various cultures. You can find egg decoration in the Jewish culture, pagan rituals, Eastern European and Slavic countries, as well as Christianity. Pysanka is a Ukrainian Easter egg decorated using a stylus and molten beeswax. Egg shoeing is a declining Hungarian tradition popular among blacksmiths in which eggs are decorated with tiny iron horseshoes.
Vegreville egg by Paul Maxum Sembaliuk, a giant sculpture of a Pysanka in Canada
“Shod” eggs --- Photo by Ant - Hungarian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39413628
The most ancient egg decorations are reported (Texier et al. 2010) to be geometric engravings on ostrich eggshells by Middle Stone Age inhabitants at Diepkloof (South Africa) about 60,000 years ago. I wonder if their egg painting traditions bear any resemblance to our practices today. If we dig deeper into our evolutionary history it is difficult to imagine any society that did not heavily interact with birds and their eggs and did not perceive eggs as a symbol of rebirth, fertility and renewal.
Diepkloof eggshell engravings
about 60,000 years old
In eastern cultures hoopoe is a symbol of spring.
Nature also has a long history of painting eggs. When female hoopoes lay their eggs in spring they "paint" them with bacteria present in oily secretions from their uropygial gland (aka preen gland) and the eggs gradually change color from blueish-grey to a more saturated greenish-brown. The surface of the hoopoe egg has a porous surface that allows the preening oil to coat the egg efficiently. These bacteria produce antibiotics and possibly prevent the egg from being colonized by harmful bacteria. Some researchers speculate that this spring ritual may be a visual way for female hoopoes to show off their breeding fitness.
Now it's time for my spring ritual and celebrating the Persian new year which occurs at the exact time of the vernal equinox, the first moment of the spring. I'm getting ready to spread my haft-seen and decorate some eggs but this year I have a little helper. I managed to find the website “Jkbrickworks” where I discovered a fellow LEGO fanatic couple who posted pictures and videos of the “Egg Decorator” and the instructions on how to build it. With a bit of creativity to substitute the parts I did not have in my EV3 kit I managed to build “Hod Hod” the robot. Hod Hod is the onomatopoeic Persian word for hoopoe and this year she has been helping me diligently with decorating eggs for Nowruz.
Meet “Hod Hod”, my egg coloring robot. She is not perfect but she gets the job done! I need to make some tweaks to account for the fact that an egg does not have spherical symmetry. One end is rounded and the other pointed and I have not taught my Hod Hod the difference yet. That will be another story for later.
Hod Hod’s first attempt at painting an egg. Don’t worry she got better with time!
And now I’m more than ready to mentor my students and their hoopoes to get ready to decorate eggs for Easter.