Art History

Agata Olek

Bulls in the News

A Brief introduction to some Bull Shit

     Symbols carry meaning, whether they are visual or written, spoken or discovered, we use symbols in order to relate ourselves to one another.  Minoan society had one very strong symbol which has often been used to represent the culture as a whole. 

 BULLS

Bulls were so important, they got to be jumped over by humans.

This image may look familiar:

  As the epicenter of Minoan culture, the Bull played a number of very important roles in Minaons' lives.  One role of the Bull was to be the main focus of death defying sports.  Anyone who could defy death in the presence of a bull was honored, and the Minoans were the best at Bull Leaping in their day and age. And if we skip forward a couple hundred decades we can see that a lot of these same principles are in practice today...

Running of the Bulls

Bull Fighting

So why is it that fighting bulls and outsmarting bulls has been a cultural phenomenon for decades?  We can take a look at the history of the bull, what it symbolizes and how it has interacted in society since the days of the Minoans. 

     According to Jack Randolph Conrad, author of The Horn and the Sword, the human race has always considered the bull to be a symbol for tremendous strength and great fertility.  This is due to the size of the beast, and our reverence for all things bigger than us.  Dr. Conrad looks back to the earliest artwork known to art historians; cave artwork.  He believes, due to the location and subjects that art including bulls was made in an attempt to conjure up control of the wild beast.  He believes there was a great deal of magic in the drawings, and the act of making art in general.  Because hunting the bull would have been such a difficult task he thinks that early man would have used any means necessary to get to the beast, especially mastering the image of one’s prey. 

      This shows some insight into the development of the symbol of the bull.  The need for a symbol was to direct magic to or from one thing to another.  Therefore creating drawings of bulls, and scenarios that happen with bulls would allow for people to discuss or at least visualize and externalize their desires for the bull.  Whatever the reason, these early people created a symbol out of necessity.  The reason the symbol of the bull would stand out so much to us now is because it was big and seemed to be a big focus for them.

     As culture shifts from simply hunting to cultivating and cattle, so does the symbol of the bull shift from food to fertilizer.  Bulls were now seen as a sign of fertility which is evident in this ancient hymn * “The great bull, the supreme bull which treads on the holy pasturage… planting corn and making the fields luxuriant.”  (It seems that early people had a very large vocabulary…) Man now understood that wherever their cattle went, the land became fertile.  So they paid homage to the bull in song and praise.  Evidence of bulls leading plows exist in Babylonian seals and show how this culture had migrated from around Asia Minor into what we now call Mesopotamia. It is in the cultures of Mesopotamia that the bull really begins to become a god.  This god was known as Enlil. (Conrad pp 46-51)

  Enlil was god of the storm, and supreme god of fertility who along with his wife Ninlil, the cow, caused the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates to rise and overflow, fertilizing the lands.  In this book (The Horn and the Sword)  Dr. Conrad discusses excavations of a Sumerian temple in Ur, at al-‘Ubaid in which the images of bulls and cows decorate the walls in precious stones and metals.  This shows a great admiration and craftsmanship going into the development of these animals as symbols of religious deities. (Conrad pp 46-51)

     As society develops into a hierarchy, the kings of Sumeria would adapt the image of the bull and wear the horns of the bull as a sign of their divinity.  One prime example of this would be the scene depicted on the Victory stele of Naram-Sin, from Susa, Iran, 2254–2218 BCE.  This scene depicts Naram-Sin leading his people into victory over the Lullubi people of present-day Iran, and as we can see Naram-Sin is wearing the bulls horn helmet and standing taller than anyone else on the pediment.  The Sumerians related kingly strength with the ability to “overpower the ox.” Strength was the determining factor in Sumerian worship and honor of the bull, while the fertility of their land seemed to be the basis of the religious worship of the bull.  The author also talks about how the Epic of Gilgamesh composes several legends of two separate bull entities into one entity named Gilgamesh, the almighty wild bull. (Conrad pp 68-74)

     The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrates the Sumerian obsession with the bull as a symbol of every aspect of life.  Known to all as a god, the Sumerians use the symbol of the bull to illustrate and explain almost all aspects of their everyday life.  There are myths that explain the vegetation-cycles, myths to explain day and night and myths that embody fertility in both population and agriculture.  Even from early on, people have admired bulls and what they symbolize.  It seems that they still represent the same things, and as we look further into the future we will see if that image changes or adapts new meaning. 

* page 25 para. 3  The Horn and the Sword  Conrad.