Aquarius is the eleventh sign, a fixed air sign traditionally ruled by Saturn and in modern astrology associated with Uranus, with the Water-Bearer as its emblem. The figure of a man pouring from a jar is old, identified in Greek myth with Ganymede, cupbearer to the gods, and in Babylonian sources with a deity called the Great One, associated with the flowing of waters and standing among a whole region of watery constellations that ancient sky-watchers grouped together in this part of the heavens. The written glyph, by contrast, belongs to a later stratum of notation, first attested alongside the rest of the zodiacal shorthand in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, the ordinary documents catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in Greek Horoscopes, and carried through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition before reaching its modern printed form in the Renaissance.
Aquarius's Unicode codepoint is U+2652, one of the twelve consecutive zodiac symbols the standard placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, two hundred fifty-six codepoints spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993, alongside separate later blocks for weather and astronomical pictographs.