A variety of symbols or iconographic conventions are used to represent

Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surfa ...

, whether in the sense of

planet Earth Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surface ...

, or the inhabited world, or as a classical element. A circle representing the round world, with the rivers of Garden of Eden separating the

four corners of the world Several cosmological and mythological systems portray four corners of the world or four quarters of the world corresponding approximately to the four points of the compass (or the two solstices and two equinoxes). At the center may lie a sacr ...

, or rotated 45° to suggest the four continents, remains a common pictographic convention to express the notion of "worldwide". The current

astronomical symbol Astronomical symbols are abstract pictorial symbols used to represent astronomical objects, theoretical constructs and observational events in European astronomy. The earliest forms of these symbols appear in Greek papyrus texts of late antiq ...

for the planet is a circle with an intersecting cross, 20px, 🜨, alt=An equilateral cross enclosed in a circle. Although the

International Astronomical Union The International Astronomical Union (IAU; french: link=yes, Union astronomique internationale, UAI) is a nongovernmental organisation with the objective of advancing astronomy in all aspects, including promoting astronomical research, outreac ...

(IAU) now discourages the use of

planetary symbol A planet symbol (or ''planetary symbol'') is a graphical symbol used in astrology and astronomy to represent a classical planet (including the Sun and the Moon) or one of the modern planets. The symbols were also used in alchemy to represent the me ...

s, this is an exception, being used in abbreviations such as ''M''_🜨 for Earth mass.

History

The earliest type of symbols are

allegories As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a hidden meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory th ...

, personifications or deifications, mostly in the form of an

Earth goddess An Earth goddess is a deification of the Earth. Earth goddesses are often associated with the "chthonic" deities of the underworld. Ki and Ninhursag are Mesopotamian earth goddesses. In Greek mythology, the Earth is personified as Gaia, corres ...

(in the case of

Egyptian mythology Egyptian mythology is the collection of myths from ancient Egypt, which describe the actions of the Egyptian gods as a means of understanding the world around them. The beliefs that these myths express are an important part of ancient Egyp ...

a god,

Geb Geb was the Egyptian god of the earth and a mythological member of the Ennead of Heliopolis. He could also be considered a father of snakes. It was believed in ancient Egypt that Geb's laughter created earthquakes and that he allowed crops to ...

). Before the recognition of the spherical shape of the Earth in the

Hellenistic period In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...

, 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 ( Gardiner N16: 𓇾). The Sumerian cuneiform sign for "earth, place" KI (𒆠) originates as a picture of a "threshing floor", and the

Chinese character Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanj ...

(土) originated as a lump of clay on a potting wheel.

Earth, the classical element

In Chinese mysticism, the classical element "Earth" is represented by the

trigram Trigrams are a special case of the ''n''-gram, where ''n'' is 3. They are often used in natural language processing for performing statistical analysis of texts and in cryptography for control and use of ciphers and codes. Frequency Contex ...

of three broken lines in the I Ching (☷). The Western (early modern)

alchemical symbol Alchemical symbols, originally devised as part of alchemy, were used to denote some elements and some compounds until the 18th century. Although notation like this was mostly standardized, style and symbol varied between alchemists, so this pag ...

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 Serpent or The Serpent may refer to: * Snake, a carnivorous reptile of the suborder Serpentes Mythology and religion * Sea serpent, a monstrous ocean creature * Serpent (symbolism), the snake in religious rites and mythological contexts * Serp ...

The planet

In the Roman period, the

globe A globe is a spherical model of Earth, of some other celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but unlike maps, they do not distort the surface that they portray except to scale it down. A model glo ...

, a representation of the spherical Earth, became the main symbol representing the concept. The globe depicted the "universe" (pictured as the celestial sphere) as well as the Earth. Diagrammatic T-O world map - 12th c

The globus cruciger (♁) is the globe surmounted by a Christian cross, held by

Byzantine Emperors This is a list of the Byzantine emperors from the foundation of Constantinople in 330 AD, which marks the conventional start of the Eastern Roman Empire, to its fall to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 AD. Only the emperors who were recognized as ...

on the one hand to represent the Christian

ecumene The ecumene ( US spelling) or oecumene ( UK spelling; grc-gre, οἰκουμένη, oikouménē, inhabited) is an ancient Greek term for the known, the inhabited, or the habitable world. In Greek antiquity, it referred to the portions of the worl ...

, 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 A world map is a map of most or all of the surface of Earth. World maps, because of their scale, must deal with the problem of projection. Maps rendered in two dimensions by necessity distort the display of the three-dimensional surface of th ...

of the three classical continents of the Old World, viz. ''

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an are ...

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

'' and ''

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

'' (in various orientations: 🜖, U+1F717

, ⦺, file:T-and-O map symbol.svg). Unicode encodes four characters representing the globe in the

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally fro ...

block: *EARTH GLOBE EUROPE-AFRICA U+1F30D *EARTH GLOBE AMERICAS U+1F30E *EARTH GLOBE ASIA-AUSTRALIA U+1F30F *GLOBE WITH MERIDIANS U+1F310

References

External links

{{Earth Alchemical symbols Symbol Astronomical symbols

History

Earth, the classical element

The planet

See also

References

External links