History of religion

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of religion begins not with a god, but with a pen. Roughly 5,200 years ago, around 3200 BCE, humans invented writing, and only then could religious feelings, thoughts, and ideas leave a record. Everything before that line belongs to prehistory, where belief existed but left no script of its own. This raises a strange problem at the very heart of the subject. The word religion, as the 21st century uses it, has no obvious pre-colonial translation into non-European languages. Sacred texts like the Bible and the Quran contained no word, and no concept, for religion in their original languages. So how did scholars come to study a thing that the people who lived it never named? What did the earliest believers actually leave behind in stone and bone? And why do historians keep returning to a single 700-year window when they ask where the modern spiritual world was born?

• 2. An Invented Category

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  The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries, long after the texts now called religious were written. Many cultures, past and present, lack the concept entirely, or reject any distinction between the natural and the supernatural. The anthropologist Daniel Dubuisson pressed this point hard. He wrote that what the West and the history of religions have objectified under the name religion is something quite unique, which could be appropriate only to itself and its own history. The systematic study of this category began with the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, a late 19th-century German school of thought. It treated religion as a socio-cultural phenomenon that evolved alongside human culture, moving from polytheism toward monotheism. This school emerged as scholarly work on the Bible and church history flourished in Germany and beyond, through the historical-critical method also known as higher criticism. Modern researchers have since taken an agnostic, pluralistic approach, hoping to move past cultural tribalism and better understand other cultures.

• 3. Reading The Oldest Evidence

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  Some archaeologists point to the deliberate burial of archaic humans, Neanderthals, and even Homo naledi as early as 300,000 years ago as proof that religious ideas already existed. That connection, the source stresses, is entirely conjectural. The interpretation of early Paleolithic artifacts remains controversial, and the same caution applies to symbolic objects from Middle Stone Age sites in Africa. Evidence grows firmer in the Upper Paleolithic, dated 50,000 to 13,000 BCE, where scientists generally read certain artifacts as expressing religious ideas. The lion man, the Venus figurines, and an elaborate ritual burial from Sungir all belong to this period. In the 19th century, theorists fought over where it all began. Edward Burnett Tylor, who lived from 1832 to 1917, and Herbert Spencer, 1820 to 1903, emphasized animism. The archaeologist John Lubbock, 1834 to 1913, preferred the term fetishism. Max Müller, the religious scholar who lived from 1823 to 1900, traced religion to hedonism. The folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt, 1831 to 1880, argued for naturalism, by which he meant mythological explanations for natural events. All of these theories were widely criticized, and no broad consensus about the origin of religion survives.

• 4. Stone Before Farming

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  Göbekli Tepe is the oldest potentially religious site yet discovered anywhere. This Pre-pottery Neolithic A location holds circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars, the world's oldest known megaliths, decorated with abstract pictograms and carved-animal reliefs. Its location matters as much as its stones. The site sits near the home place of original wild wheat, yet it was built before the Neolithic Revolution, the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BCE. That ordering unsettles old assumptions. The construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an advanced order not previously associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies. The builders raised it without farms to feed them. It was abandoned around the time the first agricultural societies started, and it is still being excavated and analyzed, which means it may yet reveal what it meant for older foraging communities.

• 5. The First Written Faiths

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  The Pyramid Texts from ancient Egypt are the oldest known religious texts in the world, dating to between 2400 and 2300 BCE. India's earliest religious records, the Vedas, were composed around 1500 to 1200 BCE during the Vedic Period. Other surviving early copies stretch the timeline forward. Some of the Upanishads date to the mid-first millennium BCE. The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve fragmentary texts of the Hebrew Tanakh, while complete Hebrew texts of that same Tanakh, translated into Greek as the Septuagint between 300 and 200 BCE, were in wide use by the early 1st century CE. The Zoroastrian Avesta survives from a Sassanian-era master copy. Writing did more than store these words. It standardized religious texts regardless of time or location, and it made prayers and divine rules easier to memorize.

• 6. The Axial Age

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  From 900 to 200 BCE, something happened that the German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers, who lived from 1883 to 1969, called the axial age. In his words, the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in this era, and these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today. The intellectual historian Peter Watson summarized the span as the foundation time of many of humanity's most influential philosophical traditions. He counted monotheism in Persia and Canaan, Platonism in Greece, Buddhism and Jainism in India, and Confucianism and Taoism in China. These ideas later became institutionalized, as seen in Ashoka's role in spreading Buddhism and in Neoplatonic philosophy at Christianity's foundation. Jainism's own historical roots in India reach back to the 9th century BCE, with the rise of Parshvanatha and his non-violent philosophy.

• 7. Faiths At War

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  During the Middle Ages, the present-day world religions established themselves across Eurasia, but rarely in peace. Christianity spread through the Western world, Buddhist missions reached East Asia, Buddhism declined in the Indian subcontinent, and Islam moved across the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, and parts of Europe and India. Conflict tracked every frontier. Muslims clashed with Zoroastrians during the Muslim conquest of Persia, 633 to 654. Christians fought Muslims through the Arab-Byzantine wars from the 7th to 11th centuries, the Crusades from 1095 onward, the Reconquista of 718 to 1492, the Ottoman wars in Europe, and the Inquisition. Shamanism met Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, and Christians during the Mongol invasions and conquests of 1206 to 1337, and Muslims clashed with Hindus and Sikhs during the Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent from the 8th to 16th centuries. Alongside the fighting, mysticism flourished. The Cathars in the West, the Jews of Spain who produced the Zohar, the Bhakti movement in India, and Sufism in Islam all deepened it. Hindu monotheist notions of Brahman reached classical form through the teaching of Adi Shankara, who lived from 788 to 820.

• 8. The Modern Turn

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  The printing press, invented in the 15th century, helped carry the Protestant Reformation rapidly across Europe under leaders such as Martin Luther, 1483 to 1546, and John Calvin, 1509 to 1564. From the 15th to the 19th century, European colonization spread Christianity to Sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the Philippines. Religious wars followed, culminating in the Thirty Years' War that ravaged Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. Then the tide began to recede. The 18th century saw the beginning of secularisation in Europe, a trend that gained momentum after the French Revolution broke out in 1789. By the late 20th century, religion had declined in most of Europe, leaving the continent that named the very concept increasingly distant from it.