Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Aries is read as the face and curved horns of the ram, the animal the sign has carried since Babylonian star lore named this stretch of the ecliptic the Hired Man and Greek tradition attached it to the golden-fleeced ram of the Argonauts. A second traditional reading takes the same two arcs as the eyebrows and bridge of the human face, which suits the old medical doctrine that Aries governs the head. Neither reading is documented in an ancient source, and the derivation is contested; what is attested is the written form itself, which appears in the medieval Byzantine codices of Greek horoscopes and is stylised into its modern shape in the Renaissance. As the first sign of the tropical zodiac it marks the vernal equinox, and the glyph stands for the cardinal fire of beginnings: initiative, appetite, courage, and the raw push of a thing coming into being.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe twelve-sign zodiac was standardised in Babylonia in the mid-first millennium BCE and fixed as equal signs in Hellenistic astrology. Place of OriginMesopotamia (Babylonia), transmitted through the Hellenistic Greek world. 2 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormTwo curved strokes read as a ram's horns. 1 Learn More
A Sign of the Zodiac
Aries is the first sign of the zodiac, the thirty-degree division of the ecliptic beginning at the northern vernal equinox. In the four-part scheme of the tradition it is a cardinal fire sign, ruled by Mars in both classical and modern astrology, and its emblem is the Ram. The written glyph that marks Aries on a chart is far younger than the sign itself. The earliest securely attested forms of the zodiacal notation come from Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, everyday documents written on papyrus and even on cheap potsherds called ostraka, the earliest of them dating to the first century of the common era.
Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen catalogued this material in their study Greek Horoscopes, published by the American Philosophical Society in 1959, and it remains the standard reference for tracing the abbreviated signs back toward their earliest surviving witnesses. From the papyri the symbols were copied and recopied through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition before reaching the standardised shapes familiar today. In the Unicode standard the Aries glyph occupies the codepoint U+2648, one of twelve consecutive zodiac symbols placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, a set of two hundred fifty-six codepoints introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Aries is read as the face and curved horns of the ram, the animal the sign has carried since Babylonian star lore named this stretch of the ecliptic the Hired Man and Greek tradition..."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this zodiac sign.
Sources
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