Because PHP was based on Perl which used $, though the symbols Perl used were meaningful and plenty used to indicate the data type, ( such as @ used to indicate an array ) PHP just has $.
PHP in its early stages was a simplistic version of Perl but over time incorporated more of Perl's features, though one may argue PHP is still a simplistic primitive version of Perl since to this day most installed versions of it don't include features that have been around in other languages forever, such as closures/namespacing.
Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, was inspired to use $ from shell