The Conventional Span and Its Basis

On the standard even division of the Great Year into twelve 2,150 year segments, the Age of Taurus is generally placed at approximately 4000 to 2000 BCE, immediately preceding the Age of Aries. This dating is a modern retrospective calculation rather than a period any Bronze Age society dated itself by; no contemporary Sumerian, Egyptian or Minoan text refers to living in an "age of the bull" in the sense the phrase carries in later astrological writing. Nicholas Campion's History of Western Astrology situates the zodiacal ages scheme itself as a later interpretive framework applied backward onto earlier bull-associated religious material, not as evidence that Bronze Age peoples held a precessional theory of history.

The proposed span nonetheless roughly overlaps genuine and well attested bull-centered religious practice: the Apis bull cult of Memphis, active from at least the Old Kingdom, the bull-leaping imagery excavated at the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, and the Bull of Heaven episode in the Sumerian and Akkadian Gilgamesh material. Whether that overlap reflects anything more than coincidence, given how common bull veneration was across the wider Bronze Age Near East regardless of any zodiacal scheme, is not something the astrological literature itself claims to have demonstrated.