India, where they are symbolic of royalty.
Like many things, the peacock and its symbolism came to ancient Greece from Babylon — but they took on a Greek provenance when they became a symbol of the goddess Hera, whose chariot they pulled. Hera, the goddess of the stars and skies, was not only the sister but the wife of the Greek god Zeus, the king of all the gods on Mount Olympus. Peacocks pulled chariot of Hera, got their “eyes” from Argos But she had longstanding problems with Zeus as his eye was known to wander, putting it mildly. He soon became interested in a priestess of Hera’s called Io, who was guarded by Hera’s own servant, an enormous giant with one hundred eyes known as Argos Panoptis. In order to possess the woman, Zeus ordered that Argus be killed; however, before this could happen, Hera immortalized her faithful watchman by turning his one hundred eyes into the spectacular “eyes” on the tail of a peacock. In the version of the myth told in “Prometheus Bound” Io initially rejected Zeus’ advances, until her father threw her out of his house on the advice of oracles. According to some stories, Zeus then turned Io into a heifer in order to hide her from his wife; others maintain that Hera herself transformed Io.