A Sign of the Zodiac

Pisces is the twelfth and last sign, a mutable water sign traditionally ruled by Jupiter and in modern astrology associated with Neptune, with the Fishes as its emblem. Paired fish already appear in Babylonian star lists well before Greek astrologers adopted a written shorthand for the zodiac, and the cord binding them together has a basis in the constellation itself, where a long line of faint stars links the two fish figures.

The written glyph now used for Pisces is a later piece of notation, first attested with 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, copied through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition across several centuries, and only fixed into its familiar printed shape during the Renaissance as almanacs and ephemerides put the zodiac into standard type. Pisces's Unicode codepoint, U+2653, closes the run of twelve consecutive zodiac symbols, from Aries at U+2648 onward, that 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.