Aristarchian symbols

Aristarchian symbols are editorial marks developed during the Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire for annotating then-ancient Greek texts—mainly the works of Homer.

The number of the philological signs and in some cases their meanings were modified by Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 BCE), sixth head of the Alexandrinian Library.

A 'dotted antisigma' or 'dotted reversed sigma' (ἀντίσιγμα περιεστιγμένον) Ͽ indicates the line after which rearrangements should be made, or to variant readings of uncertain priority.

For instance, the so-called ancora, an anchor-shaped diagonal upward and downward pointer ⸔ or ⸕, often marks places where text had been omitted or draws attention to text-critical restoration in the top or bottom margin, respectively.

In addition to no punctuation, many original source texts in ancient Greek were written as an unbroken stream of letters, with no separation between words.

[2][3][4][5][6] Nine ancient Greek textual annotation symbols are included in the supplemental punctuation list of ISO IEC standard 10646 for character sets.