Silchester Eagle
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The Silchester eagle is a Roman bronze casting dating from the first or second century CE, uncovered in 1866 at
Calleva Atrebatum Calleva Atrebatum ("Calleva of the Atrebates") was an Iron Age oppidum, the capital of the Atrebates tribe. It then became a walled town in the Roman province of Britannia, at a major crossroads of the roads of southern Britain. The modern vi ...
in
Silchester Silchester is a village and civil parish about north of Basingstoke in Hampshire. It is adjacent to the county boundary with Berkshire and about south-west of Reading. Silchester is most notable for the archaeological site and Roman town of ...
, Hampshire, England. It was purchased in 1980 by
Reading Museum Reading Museum (run by the Reading Museum Service) is a museum of the history of the town of Reading, in the English county of Berkshire, and the surrounding area. It is accommodated within Reading Town Hall, and contains galleries describing ...
in Berkshire where it remains on display .


History

The Silchester eagle was discovered, wingless and damaged, on 9 October 1866 by the Reverend J. G. Joyce during the excavation of a Roman
basilica In Ancient Roman architecture, a basilica (Greek Basiliké) was a large public building with multiple functions that was typically built alongside the town's forum. The basilica was in the Latin West equivalent to a stoa in the Greek Eas ...
where it was likely part of a larger statue. It stands approximately high and has a hollow space inside which was accessed through a (now missing) square lid located on the top of the back of the bird. It was found buried in a layer of charred wood, leading the discoverer to believe that it might have been the sacred eagle of a Roman legion and had been hidden for safekeeping in the rafters of the
aerarium ''Aerarium'', from ''aes'' ("bronze, money") + -''ārium'' ("place for"), was the name given in Ancient Rome to the public treasury, and in a secondary sense to the public finances. ''Aerarium populi Romani'' The main ''aerarium'', that of ...
(treasury). However, more recent archaeologists have suggested that the piece may have been intended as nothing more than scrap metal by the Romans at the time that it was lost, and was awaiting being recycled when the aerarium burnt down. The curve of the feet suggests that the eagle's talons had grasped a globe that was probably held in the hand of a statue, possibly of Jupiter.


3D scan

A plaster copy of the Silchester eagle was 3D scanned in 2022. It is accessible on
Sketchfab Sketchfab is a 3D asset website used to publish, share, discover, buy and sell 3D model, 3D, Virtual reality, VR and Augmented reality, AR content. It provides a viewer based on the WebGL and WebXR technologies that allows users to display 3D m ...
.


See also

*''
The Eagle of the Ninth ''The Eagle of the Ninth'' is a historical adventure novel for children written by Rosemary Sutcliff and published in 1954. The story is set in Roman Britain in the 2nd century AD, after the building of Hadrian's Wall and follows a young centu ...
'', the 1954 novel by
Rosemary Sutcliff Rosemary Sutcliff (14 December 1920 – 23 July 1992) was an English novelist best known for children's books, especially historical fiction and retellings of myths and legends. Although she was primarily a children's author, some of her novel ...
that was inspired by the Silchester eagle * ''The Eagle'', the 2011 film based on the novel


References


External links

{{Commons category-inline, Silchester Eagle Archaeological artifacts Eagles in art Roman Britain 1866 archaeological discoveries Archaeological discoveries in the United Kingdom