ABSTRACT
The topography and environment of Mesopotamia was to be crucial in the promotion and diffusion of religious cults involving bulls. Southern Mesopotamia has no minerals, virtually no stone, hardly any trees whose timber would be worth inclusion on a builder's inventory. The origin of the Sumerians, and of the people's who occupied Mesopotamia before the Sumerians can be named, has perplexed scholars ever since they were identified. Sumerian seals are not the only important medium which records the preoccupations of the society and those concepts which were of special significance to the people. In Mesopotamia the creature with a bull's head on the body of a man is a benevolent figure, one of the guardians against evil. The composite bull-man will eventually be transported, probably from Mesopotamia to the Aegean, where, especially in myths identified with Crete, he became the Minotaur, an equivocal being who is the prisoner of his own confused nature.
