But you missed the point that until the first microscope came along in??? 1600's? no one even knew that there were little things swimming in almost everything they looked at.
Maybe the Egyptians understood sperm and eggs getting together but I doubt it.
Certainly those looking at it until cell theory was developed and for some years after that did not know about the sperm and one of the more popular beliefs was that each person carried little copies of themselves that carried little copies of the next generation etc.
The biggest question was whether the man carried these replicas or the woman did.

I can not find a definitive year that recognition became widespread and accepted that those 'worms' and 'parasites ' the microscopes showed were in ejaculate were actually part of the process leading to conception but memory says it was around 1875.
Before that the preformationist was the accepted belief.

Here is one article about how things were discovered but before the final recognition of sperm and egg cells being involved.
Not having luck finding the information I was looking for about the final recognition happening and when that occurred but know it was several years after cell theory was accepted and that was around the mid 1850ies I think.


https://www.sapiens.org/column/origins/sperm-and-reproduction/

In spite of these experiments—and a lifetime of scientific thinking and observation and discovery—Magnifico concluded that sperms actually had nothing to do with fertilization. Go ahead and reread that sentence. Sperms didn’t matter! Why, Magnifico, why? If semen is important, why discount the importance of these “little animals,” these “seminal Worms”?

I think if we all use our imaginations we can sympathize. Look at any liquid at hand under a primitive, low-resolution microscope and it’ll be crawling with germs that are difficult to classify as anything but. If water’s got them, but water’s not fertilizing eggs, then what’s so special about sperms? What’s more, it’s completely astounding that a baby is made at all, let alone when you realize that just one out of millions of totally spastic sperms meets up with an egg. Reliving this moment of discovery in our species’ struggle to understand life’s mysteries shows we shouldn’t take our present knowledge for granted. And it transforms something we do tend to take for granted, baby making, into something fresh and extraordinary.