⊿ Point. {R} Glossary. ◢ Keyword: A. ◥ University. {q} PhD. {tr} Training. ⚫ UK. ↂ EndNote. ✊ Harvey (2009) Augury. Roman religious practice This type of omen reading was already a millennium old in the time of Classical Greece: in the fourteenth-century BC diplomatic correspondence preserved in Egypt called the "Amarna correspondence", the practice was familiar to the king of Alasia in Cyprus who needed an 'eagle diviner' to be sent from Egypt.[4] This earlier, indigenous practice of divining by bird signs, familiar in the figure of Calchas, the bird-diviner to Agamemnon, who led the army (Iliad I.69), was largely replaced by sacrifice-divination through inspection of the sacrificial victim's liver—haruspices—during the Orientalizing period of archaic Greek culture.
Plato notes that hepatoscopy held greater prestige than augury by means of birds.[5] One of the most famous auspices is the one which is connected with the founding of Rome. Once the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, arrived at the Palatine Hill, the two argued over where the exact position of the city should be. History[edit]