Virgo is the sixth sign, a mutable earth sign ruled by Mercury, with the Maiden as its emblem. Of all twelve zodiac glyphs, Virgo's is among the most argued over by scholars of the notation itself. One long standing account reads the written form as a ligature of the Greek letters pi, alpha and rho, an abbreviation of parthenos, the Greek word for virgin or maiden, while a rival explanation traces the same shape to a seated woman rendered in Egyptian Demotic script; neither theory commands full agreement among specialists, and both remain proposals argued from the shape of the surviving letters rather than a settled fact confirmed by any ancient commentator.
What is not in dispute is that the mark, whatever its true source, travelled through the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in Greek Horoscopes, and the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition before reaching its modern printed form in the Renaissance. Virgo's Unicode codepoint is U+264D, part of the consecutive run of twelve zodiac symbols placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.