 When Zeus saw her, he transformed himself into a bull and approached her and her playing friends.She climbed onto the bull's back and it swam off to Crete, where she had three sons with it (Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon, the first two of which constitute, together with Aeacus, the three judges of the underworld).Another possibility, proposed by Ernest Klein, is that it derives from the ancient Sumerian and Semitic root "Ereb", which carries the meaning of "darkness" or "descent", a reference to the region's western location in relation to Mesopotamia, the Levantine Coast, Anatolia, and the Bosporus.