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.