Among the host of rock-carvings in the Eyuk section of the mountains of Cappadocia (Pteria of the Greeks) that are attributed to the Hittites, Perrot and Chipiez found carvings of a double-headed eagle which they illustrate;[[112]] and they speak of them as often occurring. “Its position is always a conspicuous one—about a great sanctuary, the principal doorway to a palace, a castle wall, and so forth; rendering the suggestion that the Pterians used the symbol as a coat of arms.”
Dr. Ward thought the Assyrian two-headed figure of their national bird resulted from an artistic effort at symmetry, balancing the wings and feet outstretched on each side, but I cannot help feeling that here among the Hittites it had its origin in a deeper sentiment than that. It seems to me that it was a way of expressing the dual sex of their godhead, presupposed, in the crudeness of primitive nature-worship, to account for the condition of earthly things, male and female uniting for productiveness—the old story of sky and earth as co-generators of all life. Many other symbols, particularly those of a phallic character, were used in Asiatic religions to typify the same idea; or perhaps the conception was of that divine duality, in the sense of co-equal power of Good and Evil, God and Satan, that later became so conspicuous in the doctrine of the ancient Persians. Could it have been a purified modification of this significance that made the eagle during the Mosaic period—if Bayley[[24]] is right—an emblem of the Holy Spirit? And Bayley adds that “its portrayal with two heads is said to have recorded the double portion of the spirit bestowed on Elisha.”
Old Mohammedan traditions, according to Dalton, give the name “hamca” to a fabulous creature identical with the bicephalous eagle carved on Hittite rock-faces. Dalton[[25]] says also that coins with this emblem were struck and issued by Malek el Sala Mohammed, one of the Sassanids, in 1217; and that this figure was engraved in the 13th century by Turkoman princes on the walls of their castles, and embroidered on their battle-flags.
To the early Greeks the eagle was the messenger of Zeus. If, as asserted, it was the royal cognizance of the Etruscans, it came naturally to the Romans, by whom it was officially adopted for the Republic in 87 B. C., when a silver eagle, standing upright on a spear, its wings half raised, its head in profile to the left, and thunderbolts in its claws, was placed on the military standards borne at the head of all the legions in the army. This was in the second consulship of Caius Marius, who decreed certain other honors to be paid to the bird’s image in the Curia.
One need not accuse the Romans of merely copying the ancient monarchies of the East. If they thought of anything beyond the majestic appearance of the noble bird, it was to remember its association with their great god Jupiter—the counterpart of Zeus. Nothing is plainer as to the origin of the ideas that later took shape in the divinities of celestial residence than that Jupiter was the personification of the heavens; and what is more natural than that the lightnings should be conceived of as his weapons? Once, early in his history, when Jupiter was equipping himself for a battle with the Titans, an eagle brought him his dart, since which time Jupiter’s eagle has always been represented as holding thunderbolts in its talons. The bird thus became a symbol of supreme power, and a natural badge for soldiers. The emperors of imperial Rome retained it on their standards, Hadrian changing its metal from silver to gold; and “the eagles of Rome” came to be a common figure of speech to express her military prowess and imperial sway.
By such a history, partly mythical, and partly practical and glorious, this bird came to typify imperialism in general. A golden eagle mounted on a spear, was the royal standard of the elder Cyrus, as it had been of his ancestors.
When Napoleon I. dreamed of universal conquest he revived on the regimental banners of his troops the insignia of his Roman predecessors in banditry—in fact he was entitled to do so, for he had inherited them by right of conquest from both Italy and Austria, the residuary legatees of Rome. Discontinued in favor of their family bees by the Bourbons, during their brief reign after the fall of Bonaparte, the eagle was restored to France by a decree of Louis Napoleon in 1852. There is a legend that a tame eagle was let loose before him when he landed in France from England to become President of the first French Republic. Now it is the proper finial for flagstaffs all over the world except, curiously, in France itself, where a wreath of laurel legally surmounts the tricolor of the Republic, which has discarded all reminders of royalty. Thus the pride of conquerors has dropped to the commonplace of fashion—
Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
The destruction of the Italian and western half of the old Roman empire was by the hands of northern barbarians who at first were mere conquerors and despoilers, but finally, affected by their contact with civilization and law, became residents in and rulers of Italy, and were proud to assume the titles and what they could of the dignity of Roman emperors. In the eighth century Charlemagne became substantially master of the western world, at least, and assumed the legionary eagle as he did the purple robes of an Augustus; and his successors held both with varying success until the tenth century, when German kings became supreme and in 962 founded that very unholy combination styled the Holy Roman Empire. For hundreds of years this fiction was maintained. At times its eagle indicated a real lordship over all Europe; between times the states broke apart, and, as each kept the royal standard, separate eagles contended for mastery. Thus Prussia and other German kingdoms retained on their shields the semblance of a “Roman” eagle; and the Teutonic Knights carried it on their savage expeditions of “evangelization” to the eastern Baltic lands.