A Sign of the Zodiac

Leo is the fifth sign, a fixed fire sign ruled by the Sun, emblematised by the Lion. The lion of the constellation carries a very old pedigree in Near Eastern sky lore, linked there to royal and solar power for centuries long before it entered Greek myth, but the compact written glyph used for the sign today is a comparatively late piece of notation. It appears with the rest of the zodiacal shorthand in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, ordinary documents of the early centuries of the common era catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in their reference work Greek Horoscopes, passed through centuries of Byzantine manuscript copying, and was only fixed into its familiar printed shape during the Renaissance, when astronomical almanacs and ephemerides began setting the zodiac consistently in type rather than copying it freehand.

Leo's Unicode codepoint, U+264C, is one of twelve consecutive zodiac symbols the standard assigned to the Miscellaneous Symbols block, a set of two hundred fifty-six codepoints running from U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993, alongside separate blocks later added for astronomical bodies and weather.