A Sign of the Zodiac

Capricorn is the tenth sign, a cardinal earth sign ruled by Saturn, with the Sea-goat as its emblem, its opening degree marking the northern winter solstice of each calendar year in the tropical reckoning. The goat-fish hybrid behind the sign is genuinely ancient, not a later invention: Babylonian cuneiform sources already name a constellation called the suhurmasu, the goat-fish, in this stretch of sky, long before Greek astrologers gave it a written abbreviation.

The compact glyph now used for Capricorn belongs to that later layer of notation, first attested with the rest of the zodiacal shorthand in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, the corpus of ordinary documents catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in Greek Horoscopes, and carried forward through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition before Renaissance printers gave it a fixed, consistently reproduced shape in successive editions of their almanacs. Capricorn's Unicode codepoint is U+2651, 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.