Abby,

You have opened a can of worms, but they are not flying worms. I never saw the show you spoke of, but I instantly remembered the words That apparently Thomas Jefferson never spoke; something to do with: "believing that Yankee Professors could lie, rather than that stones could fall from heaven." (For some good work on that point, visit:

http://www.monticello.org/site/blog-and-community/posts/who-liar-now

It is a salutary experience!)

Now, There are some pictures of flying craft on various on-line sites, and most of those that I saw were unimaginative fakes. They make the "Face on Mars" look like hard science.

However, remember that various flying or near-flying toys or wishful-thought flying toys, ranging from feathers on corks, and boomerangs, to toy gliders and kites, existed for centuries before da Vinci's brilliant conceptions. And after his stuff, it took centuries to get anything seriously off the ground. And man-centuries of human effort. It took many more man-centuries to turn the works of Lilienthal, Santos-Dumant, the Wrights and others into the glorious objects of enjoyment and destruction that we rejoice in today.

That the Egyptians might have conceived something clever, I am not much inclined to doubt, but that they got withing shouting distance of even a hot air balloon, I do not believe.

But suit yourself, of course. I once was wrong before. Some people think it might have happened twice, but of course, one does not wish to overdo one's cynicism.

I know of no archeological evidence that ancient Egyptions had flying objects large enough to carry people.  That doesn't mean that they didn't have kites and gliding toys. 

One thing to keep in mind is that pictures left by ancient people are no different than our art. They represent dreams as well as reality. So a picture of a birdlike object with people on its back may be a metaphor, a fable, or some artist's dream of crossing the Nile without losing a foot to the crocodiles.

They probably would have had some knowledge of flight. They certainly would have observed large birds flying and looked at the structure of their wings. They had boats on the Nile and would have knowledge of action and reaction from rowing or paddling their boats. Boats driven by sails would have given them knowledge of aerofoils and how to generate thrust from redirecting air flow. What they lacked was the materials and mechanisms to achieve powered man carrying flight.

A cursory look at the achievements of the Wright brothers will show you that they had the knowledge and the ability to build petrol engines and also to obtain and refine oil to make petrol. They had knowledge of the use of wire braces (from bridge building) to build their craft. They also had a supply of steel wire and other materials that went into their flyer.

When the human race achieves something such as powered flight, it is done by gathering together knowledge and abilities from a number of diverse areas of study. Building the machines that we do now is a result of "ahead on all fronts" development. Today you will see many very old ideas being put into practice just because we have had to wait for the right materials to be available.

Given that the Egyptians did not have a highly mechanised society I do not think that they would have been able to construct a man carrying aircraft.

The ancient Egyptians, classical Greeks and Romans certainly knew of materials with good enough strength-to-weight ratios to build a hang glider or conventional glider, controlled with elevators, ailerons and a rudder.  Either of these machines would be launched down a suitable slope, and you'd soon learn how to take advantage of thermals.  It's hard to imagine any reasonably intelligent person observing the launch of a paper glider or a large bird gliding without wondering what fundamental reasons prevent heavier-than-air manned flight.  And long before 19th century clergymen pontificated that flying was reserved for the angels, heavier-than-air machines in the form of rockets and large birds already existed.  And by the mid 19th century, constructing airships was just a problem in engineering, not fundamental pyysics.  

O! They definitely flew (on their pigs!)