A Sign of the Zodiac

Cancer is the fourth sign, a cardinal water sign ruled by the Moon, with the Crab as its emblem, its opening degree marking the northern summer solstice each year. The crab itself is an old fixture of Near Eastern sky lore, but the compact written glyph now used to mark the sign on a chart belongs to a much later layer of history. It surfaces alongside the other zodiacal notation in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, everyday documents of the early centuries CE catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in their standard reference work Greek Horoscopes, was copied through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition, and only reached its familiar printed shape in the Renaissance, once astronomical almanacs and ephemerides, following the model of Regiomontanus's Nuremberg press of the 1470s, began setting the zodiac signs in type rather than copying them out by hand generation after generation. Cancer's Unicode codepoint is U+264B, one of the twelve consecutive zodiac symbols the standard placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, a range of two hundred fifty-six codepoints spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.