One of the jokes of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s
Astérix comics is that the names of the two main characters, Astérix and Obélix, are typographic puns: the asterisk and obelus (also
obelisk, thus a double pun referring both to the punctuation mark and to the
menhirs that Obélix carries around) were used since
Aristarchus of Samothrace edited Homer in the 2nd century BC. The origins and early use of both punctuation marks are described in a chapter of Keith Houston’s cheerfully readable
Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks (2013), practically the only reasonably informative book in English about the history of punctuation since Malcolm Parkes’s more scholarly
Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1993). For more about the obelus (which became the modern
typographic dagger), read Houston’s book. Here I will focus on the asterisk.