In Mesopotamian myth scorpion-men, half-human and terrible, guard the mountain gate through which the sun rises and sets, and the hero Gilgamesh must pass them on his journey to the edge of the world. The scorpion is one of the oldest of the zodiac signs, Scorpio, and Greek myth set it in the sky as the creature that killed the giant hunter Orion, sent, in one telling, by the goddess whose modesty or whose creatures he had offended, so that the two constellations were placed on opposite sides of the sky, Orion forever setting as Scorpius rises. Guardian and killer, protector and poison, the scorpion carries a consistently double-edged symbolism of death held at bay.
Scorpions are also one of the true living fossils among arthropods: fossil scorpions are known from the Silurian period, more than four hundred million years ago, among the very earliest animals to move onto land, and their basic body plan has changed remarkably little since, so the animal feared and revered across the ancient Near East was already, by the standards of its own antiquity, an ancient creature. The scorpion's fearsome reputation outruns the biology: of roughly two and a half thousand known scorpion species, only around thirty, concentrated in the family Buthidae, carry venom dangerous enough to kill a healthy adult human, and most of the world's scorpions deliver a sting no worse than a wasp's, a divergence between ancient dread and modern toxicology worth noting beside the guardian-and-killer symbolism above.