Glyph and Origin

The glyph is a pair of parallel zigzag lines, read as ripples or as the two streams poured from the water-bearer's jar, and it is one of the more stable of the twelve sign glyphs, passing through the Byzantine manuscript copies of Greek horoscopes, the corpus catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen, into modern printing with comparatively little change of form across the centuries, one of the few sign glyphs whose medieval and modern versions a non-specialist could match at a glance.

The sign is part of the Babylonian zodiac fixed in Hellenistic astrology, and the region of sky around it carries a whole cluster of watery constellations, from the neighbouring Fish to the Southern Fish that the poured stream is sometimes said to feed. Fifteenth and sixteenth century printed almanacs and ephemerides, following the example set by Regiomontanus's Nuremberg Kalendarium, helped settle the glyph's final typeset shape as it moved from manuscript into print for the first time. The tropical sign no longer aligns with the constellation Aquarius, the two having drifted apart through precession, the same gradual axial wobble responsible for the parallel drift of every other tropical sign from its namesake.