If you’ve read about astrology, browsed your horoscope, or looked up your birth chart, you know about the Western zodiac. Maybe identifying those constellations seems a little like cloud watching: You look at a cloud and see a rabbit, while your friend sees a duck. Where did these patterns of stars originate? Discovering the answer to that question requires a quick stroll through ancient and modern history.
Where Did Our Constellations Come From?
The Western zodiac was finalized in the form we know today nearly 2,000 years ago, documented by the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. Yet even Greek knowledge came from older sources: the Babylonians. Writing for Space.com, Nola Taylor Redd mentions that the Babylonians may have inherited their practices from their Sumerian predecessors, whose civilization began centuries before Babylonian astrologers studied the stars.
The Sumerians may have been among the first to identify our zodiac’s constellations, tracing these arrangements of stars in our night skies. Leo is likely one of the earliest identified star patterns, as another Space.com piece reveals. Our ancient ancestors recognized it by several different names: Sky watchers in India called it Simha, while the Israelites knew it as Arye, and the Persians referred to it is as Shir or Ser. Unsurprisingly, all these names translate as “lion.”
How Our Ancestors Saw the Zodiacs
Of course, other constellations bore multiple names in ancient times. Blogger Gavin White discusses over 50 identified by the ancient Babylonians. In their astronomical studies, Pisces appears as two separate entities: Anunitum, Akkad’s patron goddess, and Sinunutu, the Great Swallow. Anunitum corresponds with the northern fish of Pisces, while Sinunutu encompasses Pisces’s western fish plus portions of Pegasus. Virgo also makes up two ancient Babylonian constellations: the Frond and the Furrow. These star watchers saw the Frond as Sarpanit, a great mother goddess and consort of the chief god Marduk, holding a sacred date palm branch. Meanwhile, the Furrow represented an ear of barley.
Other Babylonian constellations correspond with those in our modern zodiac but were known by different names. Aries was called the Hired Man, for instance, and Aquarius was known as the Great One. Sagittarius was the mighty Pabilsag, a hunter deity depicted with the head and torso of a man, the legs and hindquarters of a horse, and the tail of a scorpion.
Constellations’ Roles in Modern Astronomy
As you’ve probably guessed, the stars in each constellation aren’t related to each other. EarthSky’s Christopher Crocket explains that they’re comprised of specific patterns that humans saw in our skies thousands of years ago. The stars and galaxies within their borders may be separated by hundreds or thousands of light-years.
Even as astrology is dismissed as a pseudoscience, modern astronomers still use constellations to help locate and categorize stars, planets, and other objects in the observable universe. Virgo is one notable example: The Virgo Galaxy Cluster contains at least 1,300 galaxies, and Space.com contributor Kim Ann Zimmerman mentions that it also contains several exoplanets. As if that weren’t enough, the Virgo Cluster is also part of a larger group of galaxies known as the Virgo Supercluster. This supercluster houses the Local Group, which includes our own Milky Way galaxy.
Everything Has a Unique Story
Though they represent mythological figures, the zodiac’s twelve constellations are themselves artifacts of a past civilization. Whether or not you dig deeper into the Greek or Babylonian myths behind the Western zodiac signs, you may wonder who first looked up at the sky and traced these patterns thousands of years ago. We may never find the answer to that question, but we can see how our ancestors connected the dots and named them. Thanks to written records, we know how astrology was shared across cultures and eventually took the form we know today.