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.