A Sign of the Zodiac

Gemini is the third sign, a mutable air sign ruled by Mercury, emblematised by the Twins, occupying the ecliptic degrees leading up to the northern summer solstice. The doubled figure is ancient, going back to a Babylonian pairing of twin gods, but the written glyph that now stands for it is a much later invention of Greek and Byzantine chart making. It first appears with the other zodiacal notation in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, everyday papyrus and ostraka documents of the early centuries of the common era that are the earliest attested source for this kind of astrological shorthand, and was carried forward through centuries of Byzantine manuscript copying, the corpus catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in Greek Horoscopes, before European printers gave it a fixed typeset form during the Renaissance, settling the sign into the shape still used in chart software today. Gemini's Unicode codepoint, U+264A, falls in the middle of the consecutive run of twelve zodiac glyphs that the standard placed in its Miscellaneous Symbols block, alongside chess, weather and other pictorial signs spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.