Hawk

The hawk or falcon was, above all, the sacred bird of ancient Egypt, embodied in Horus, the sky-god and divine model of kingship, shown as a falcon or a falcon-headed man whose eyes were the sun and the moon; the living pharaoh was Horus on earth. The sun-god himself was worshipped in falcon form as Ra-Horakhty, Horus of the two horizons, a falcon-headed figure crowned with the solar disc. The bird's soaring flight and its keen far-seeing eye made it a natural image of the sky, the sun and the all-seeing divine, and the human-headed hawk could depict the ba, an aspect of the soul.

The hawk's real physiology backs up its old reputation for unmatched sight: a hawk's eye is estimated to resolve detail some two to three times more sharply than a human eye, with a density of light-sensing cells in the retina far beyond ours and, in many species, a second area of sharp focus angled to the side of the head as well as forward, letting the bird track prey below while still watching the wider sky, a genuine optical basis for the far-seeing eye the Egyptians read as the sun and the moon. Egyptologists disagree on exactly which bird stood behind Horus's falcon form, since ancient art is rarely precise enough to distinguish species; the lanner falcon and the peregrine falcon are the two most commonly proposed candidates, both native to the Nile valley and both fast, keen-eyed hunters, and the identification remains a matter of informed inference rather than settled fact.

The hawk's legendary eyesight, it can see prey from a great height, made it, far beyond Egypt, an emblem of vision, vigilance and spiritual insight, the bird that sees what is hidden and that carries the gaze aloft. As a bird of prey it stood for nobility, war and the hunt, and the sport of falconry lent it associations with kingship and rank across Europe and Asia. In many traditions the hawk is a messenger, a bearer of omens and a link between the human world and the sky. Sun, kingship, the soul, far sight and the message from above gather to the sharp-eyed bird whose flight the ancients read as a movement between earth and heaven.

Falconry itself has a documented long history distinct from any myth: the sport is attested in Mesopotamia by the second millennium BCE and reached a particular refinement in medieval Europe and the Mongol and Islamic courts, where the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II wrote De Arte Venandi cum Avibus, on the art of hunting with birds, around 1240, a detailed and empirically observant treatise on falcon behaviour still consulted by historians of ornithology today. The bird's ancient reverence has not shielded it from modern harm: peregrine falcon populations collapsed across much of North America and Europe in the mid twentieth century from the pesticide DDT, which thinned eggshells past the point of survival, and only recovered after DDT was banned in the United States in 1972, a near-extinction and recovery unknown to any of the older traditions that read the bird as a symbol of unassailable sight.