AUSPICE

Auspice

An auspice is literally "one who looks at birds", a diviner who reads omens from the observed flight of birds. This type of omen reading was already a millennium old in the time of Classical Greece: in the fourteenth-century BCE diplomatic correspondence preserved in Egypt called the "Amarna correspondence", the practice was familiar to the king of Alasia in Cyprus who has need of an 'eagle diviner' to be sent from Egypt. This earlier, indigenous practice of divining by bird signs, familiar in the figure of Calchas, the bird-diviner to Agamemnon, who has led the army, was largely replaced by sacrifice-divination through inspection of the ...

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auspice

Noun

  1. Patronage or protection.
    This building was built under the auspices of the Friends of the Poor.
  2. An omen or a sign.
    The circle of vultures was not a good auspice.
  3. Divination from the actions of birds.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: auspice
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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