Reworking the Wikipedia article on Augery:
An augur/auspex interpreting omen while literally "looking at birds" is referred to as "taking the auspices" (Latin:
auspicium). The omen (sign) could be
auspicious (favourable) or inauspicious (not favourable). Augery = auspicy. Augury was one of the most ancient forms of divination used in Ancient Greece, Rome, the Celtic Empire, and Egypt (among others).
Pliny the Elder attributes the invention of auspicy to
Tiresias the blind prophet/seer/clairvoyant of Apollo in Thebes: the generic model of a seer in the Greco-Roman literary culture.
This type of omen reading was already a millennium old in the time of Classical Greece (the 200 years of the 5th and 4th centuries
BCE) ... the practice was familiar to the king of Alasia in Cyprus who needed an 'eagle diviner' to be sent from Egypt; from the 14th century
BCE Amarna tablets/correspondence/tablets, containing diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru.
The 'indigenous' practice (?) of divining by bird signs was familiar in the figure of Calchas, the bird-diviner to Agamemnon, who led the army (
Iliad I.69).
(The Wikipedia article on augery says it "was largely replaced by sacrifice-divination involving inspection of a sacrificial victim's liver—haruspices [haruspicy]—during the Orientalizing period of archaic Greek culture. Plato noted that such 'hepatoscopy' held greater prestige than augury/auspicy
[Phadreus 244C].)
The Romans called it augury,
the Greeks called it ornithomancy, but it was essentially the same thing – reading the type, number, flight patterns, and behavior of birds to acquire messages from the gods. The Romans and Greeks considered augurs sacred spiritual leaders and looked to them for advice and fortune telling ... ancient Celtic priests, the Druids, also performed augury bird divination.
Augury In Ancient Texts & Myths
Augury bird divination is mentioned in ancient texts and seen in paintings of augurs on ancient relics from the Etruscan empire dating to the five-hundreds
BCE. Agamemnon, a Greek mythical figure, [is said to have had] had an augury bird diviner at his side to give him divine guidance. There were other forms of augury, including reading animal omens and weather patterns, but reading birds flight patterns was most popular in ancient Greece and Rome.
https://otherworldlyoracle.com/augury-b ... -patterns/
.Ornithomancy (modern term from Greek
ornis "bird" and
manteia "divination"; in Ancient Greek:
οἰωνίζομαι "take omens from the flight and cries of birds") is the practice of reading omens from the actions of birds followed in many ancient cultures including the Greeks, and is equivalent to the augury employed by the ancient Romans.
Mediterranean developments
Prophesying by birds appeared among the
Hittites in Anatolia, with texts on bird oracles written in Hittite known from the 13th or 14th century
BCE,
[2] and from whom the Greek practice may derive. It was also familiar to the Etruscans, who may have brought it to Rome
[L. Cottrell (1996) The Penguin Book of Lost Worlds 2; p.158].
2 Sakuma, Yasuhiko (2013)
'Terms of Ornithomancy in Hittite' (PDF). T
okyo University Linguistic Papers (TULIP) 33: 219–238.
Greek evidence
Ornithomancy dates back to early Greek times, appearing on Archaic vases, as well as in Hesiod and Homer: one notable example from the latter occurs in the
Odyssey, when an eagle appears three times, flying to the right, with a dead dove in its talons, an augury interpreted as the coming of Odysseus, and the death of his wife's suitors. Aeschylus has Prometheus claim to have introduced ornithomancy to mankind, by indicating among the birds “those by nature favourable, and those/Sinister” ...
Biblical references
...Main article: Divination
Ornithomancy is mentioned several times in the Septuagint version of the Bible. After Joseph discovers the silver bowl he had hidden in his brothers' luggage, he declaims, "Why have ye stolen my silver cup? is it not this out of which my lord drinks? and he divines augury with it"
[Gen 44:5 LXX; cf. Gen 44:15 LXX]. Later, however, the practice of divination is expressly forbidden
[Deut 18:10; Lev 19:26 LXX].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornithomancy
Attus Navius
Contrary to other divinatory practices in Rome (e.g. haruspicy; consultation of the
libri Sibyllini) Roman augury appears to be
autochthonous ['native'] and pre-historical, originally Latin or Italic, and attested in the
Iguvine Tables (
avif aseria) [see below] and among other Latin tribes.
The very story or legend of the foundation of Rome is based on augury: the ascertaining of the will of gods through observation of the sky and of birds. Romulus and Remus, indeed, [were said to have] acted as augurs and Romulus was considered a great augur throughout the course of his life.
The character that best represented and portrayed the art however was Attus Navius. His story is related by Cicero:
He was born into a very poor family. One day he lost one of his pigs. He then promised the gods that if he found it, he would offer them the biggest grapes growing in his vineyard. After recovering his pig he stood right at the middle of his grape yard facing South. He divided the sky into four sections and observed birds: when they appeared he walked in that direction and found an extraordinary large grape that he offered to the gods.
His story was immediately famous and he became the augur of the king (see above the episode with king Tarquinius narrated by Livy). Henceforth he was considered the patron of the augurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur#Attus_Navius
The Iguvine Tablets, also known as the Eugubian Tablets or Eugubine Tables, are a series of seven bronze tablets from ancient Iguvium (modern Gubbio), Italy, written in the ancient Italic language Umbrian. The earliest tablets, written in the native Umbrian alphabet, were probably produced in the 3rd century
BCE, and the latest, written in the Latin alphabet, from the 1st century
BCE. The tablets contain religious inscriptions that memorialize the acts and rites of the Atiedian Brethren, a group of 12 priests of Jupiter with important municipal functions at Iguvium. The religious structure present in the tablets resembles that of the early stage of Roman religion, reflecting the Roman archaic triad and the group of gods more strictly related to Jupiter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iguvine_Tablets
From the Wikipedia article on Augery:
History
According to unanimous testimony from ancient sources the use of auspices as a means to decipher the will of the gods was more ancient than Rome itself ... some modern historians link the act of observing auspices to the Etruscans; Cicero accounts in his text
De Divinatione several differences between the auspices of the Romans and the Etruscan system of interpreting the will of the gods. Cicero also mentions several other nations which, like the Romans, paid attention to the patterns of flying birds as signs of the gods' will, but [he] never mentions this practice while discussing the Etruscans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augury#History
Position of the augur
... Until 300 BCE only patricians could become augurs
... However, in 300
BCE a new law,
Lex Ogulnia, increased the number of augurs from four to nine and required that five of the nine be plebeians, for the first time granting the ability to interpret the will of the gods to lower classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augury#Po ... _the_augur
