This Egyptian marble kilga would have originally supported a water jar made of unglazed earthenware.
The porous walls of the water jar would drip and seep as some of its contents evaporated. In turn, the seeped water, filtered by its passage through the unglazed walls of the jar, would collect in the projecting trough at the front of the kilga, where it could be scooped out and drunk. Kilgas were apparently unique to medieval Cairo, a city perilously dependent for its water on the annual flooding of the Nile.