Earth symbol


A variety of symbols or iconographic conventions are used to represent :wikt:Earth|Earth, whether in the sense of planet Earth, or the inhabited world, or as a classical element. Representations of the globe of Earth, either with an indication of the shape of the continents or with a representation of meridians and parallels remains a common pictographic convention to express the notion of "worldwide, global". The modern astronomical symbol for Earth as a planet uses a circle with a cross is ?.

History

The earliest type of symbols are allegories, personifications or deifications, mostly in the form of an Earth goddess.
Before the recognition of the spherical shape of the Earth in the Hellenistic period, the main attribute of the Earth was its being flat. The Egyptian hieroglyph for "earth, land" depicts a stretch of flat alluvial land with grains of sand. Similarly, the Sumerian cuneiform sign for "earth" KI originates as a picture of a "threshing floor".

Earth, the classical element

In Chinese mysticism, the classical element "Earth" is represented by the trigram of three broken lines in the I Ching. The Wu Xing system represents the element Earth as 土 .
The Western alchemical symbol for earth is a downward-pointing triangle bisected by a horizontal line. Other symbols for the earth in alchemy or mysticism include the square and the serpent.

The planet

In the Roman period, the globe, a representation of the spherical Earth, became the main symbol representing the concept.
The globe depicted the "universe" as well as the Earth.
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The globus cruciger is the globe surmounted by a Christian cross, held by Byzantine Emperors on the one hand to represent the Christian ecumene, on the other hand the Akakia represented the mortal nature of all men.
In the medieval period, the known world was also represented by the T-and-O figure, representing an extremely simplified world map of the three classical continents of the Old World, viz. Asia, Europe and Africa.
Unicode has introduced a four characters representing the "globe" in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block: