Egg-shaped ornaments such as this one were hung on chains from which oil lamps were suspended in churches, mosques or shrines in the eastern and southern Mediterranean, and have, since antiquity, continued to decorate religious or holy spaces. In addition to their symbolic associations, the ostrich eggs also provided a practical purpose of preventing mice from climbing down the chains to drink the olive oil from the lamps. While ostrich eggs seemed to have been used primarily as hanging ornaments, references do exist in biographical literature that associates their principal use as drinking vessels; such references even allude to the Prophet Muhammed drinking from an ostrich egg.

One result of the popularity of ostrich eggs as church and mosque decorations was the development of ceramic eggs for the same purpose. Like the use of the ostrich egg itself, the employment and production of ceramic eggs was inseparable from the world of Islam, with different centres of production as widespread as Iznik, Turkey and Cairo, Egypt. Today, the largest quantities of surviving ostrich eggs hang on the other side of the Indian Ocean in the Muslim shrines of India and Pakistan.