Glyph and Origin

The glyph is an arrow drawn diagonally across a short bar, standing for the archer's drawn bow, and of all twelve sign glyphs it is among the least disputed in its pictorial reading, since both the Mesopotamian and the Greek traditions behind the constellation agree on an armed figure with a weapon aimed outward. The sign belongs to the Babylonian twelvefold zodiac fixed in Hellenistic astrology, its archer identified at times with the wise centaur Chiron and at other times with Crotus, son of Pan, and aimed by tradition at the heart of the neighbouring Scorpion.

The written form survives chiefly through the medieval Byzantine copies of Greek horoscopes catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen, and it was fixed into a settled printed shape only once fifteenth century almanacs, beginning with Regiomontanus's Nuremberg Kalendarium and Ephemerides, printed from his own press starting in 1474, began setting the zodiac signs consistently in type rather than copying them by hand. The sign has separated from its constellation through the slow precession of the equinoxes, the same gradual axial wobble that has shifted every tropical sign away from its own namesake stars over roughly two thousand years.