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.