Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Taurus is conventionally read as the head of a bull seen face on, a circle for the muzzle surmounted by the sweep of the horns. The bull is among the oldest of the zodiacal images, the Babylonian Bull of Heaven standing at the spring equinox in the third millennium BC, and the Greek myth of Zeus carrying Europa over the sea in bull form is attached to the same stars. The pictorial reading is traditional rather than attested, and the medieval forms differ noticeably from the modern one; in the Byzantine manuscripts the Taurus glyph resembles what is now drawn for Capricorn, and the familiar circle-and-horns is a later regularisation. The sign is fixed earth, and the glyph stands for what it depicts: patience, appetite, steadiness, the body and its pleasures, and the slow accumulation of substance and worth.
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 FormA circle surmounted by a rising crescent, read as a bull's head and horns. 1 Learn More
A Sign of the Zodiac
Taurus is the second sign of the zodiac, a fixed earth sign ruled by Venus, with the Bull as its emblem, spanning the second thirty degrees of the ecliptic after the vernal point. Its written glyph is a much later addition to a far older constellation: the bull was already marked near the spring equinox in Babylonian sky lore of the third millennium BCE, long before any Greek abbreviation existed to notate it on a chart.
The symbol that now stands for Taurus emerges only in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, everyday documents from the early centuries of the common era that Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen gathered into their catalogue Greek Horoscopes, and in the Byzantine manuscripts that copied that older material across the medieval centuries. It reached its modern printed shape only in the Renaissance, when printers producing astronomical calendars and ephemerides settled on a standard typeset form. Its Unicode codepoint, U+2649, sits in the same consecutive run of twelve zodiac symbols, from Aries at U+2648 to Pisces at U+2653, that Unicode placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993, a block that also holds weather, chess and warning signs among its two hundred fifty-six codepoints.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Taurus is conventionally read as the head of a bull seen face on, a circle for the muzzle surmounted by the sweep of the horns."
Zeus, Deities This source names Zeus directly: "millennium BC, and the Greek myth of Zeus carrying Europa over the sea in bull form is attached to the same stars."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this zodiac sign.
Sources
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