Sagittarius

Sagittarius is the ninth sign, a mutable fire sign ruled by Jupiter, emblematised by the Archer, a centaur drawing a bow, its degrees running up to the northern winter solstice each year. The figure behind the sign has deep Mesopotamian roots: Babylonian sky lore placed here a composite being named Pabilsag, part man and part horse, with a scorpion's tail and in some depictions wings, later simplified by Greek astronomers into the familiar centaur archer of classical myth, shedding the wings and the animal head along the way.

The written glyph used for Sagittarius, by contrast, is a much later piece of notation, first attested with the rest of the zodiacal shorthand in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, the corpus catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in Greek Horoscopes, and carried forward through Byzantine manuscript copying before reaching its modern printed form in the Renaissance. Sagittarius's Unicode codepoint, U+2650, falls within the run of 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 it was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.