Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Libra is a horizontal bar surmounted by a smaller bar rising to a curve, read as a weighing balance with its beam, and alternatively as the sun resting on the horizon at the moment of equal day and night. It is the one sign of the twelve represented by an object rather than a living creature. The scales are Babylonian in origin, the constellation Zibanitu having been read there as the balance, while Greek tradition long treated the same stars as the claws of the Scorpion, and the Romans restored the balance; this double history is well attested. The written form is among the more stable of the sign glyphs and changes little between the Byzantine manuscripts and the modern printed form. Libra is cardinal air, and the glyph stands for what a balance does: comparison, proportion, justice, negotiation, and the weighing of self against other.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe twelve-sign zodiac was standardised in Babylonia in the mid-first millennium BCE and fixed as equal signs in Hellenistic astrology. Place of OriginMesopotamia (Babylonia), transmitted through the Hellenistic Greek world. 2 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormA horizontal bar carrying a raised curve, the beam of a balance. 1 Learn More
A Sign of the Zodiac
Libra is the seventh sign, a cardinal air sign ruled by Venus, and the only zodiac sign whose emblem is an inanimate object, the Scales; its opening degree marks the northern autumnal equinox. Libra is also the youngest of the twelve signs to be individuated as its own figure. To Hellenistic Greek astrologers these same stars had long been counted as the Claws, the pincers of the neighbouring Scorpion, and it was Roman tradition that recast them as an independent balance, a change commemorated to this day in the names of Libra's two brightest stars, Zubenelgenubi and Zubeneschamali, which still carry the Arabic word for claw as a fossil of the older reading passed down through medieval Arabic astronomy.
The written glyph that marks Libra on a chart belongs to the same layer of notation as the other signs, first attested in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen, and copied through Byzantine manuscripts across the medieval centuries. Libra's Unicode codepoint, U+264E, sits within the twelve consecutive zodiac symbols placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, a range of two hundred fifty-six codepoints, when it was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Libra is a horizontal bar surmounted by a smaller bar rising to a curve, read as a weighing balance with its beam, and alternatively as the sun resting on the horizon at the moment of..."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this zodiac sign.
Sources
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