Ancient traditions have repeatedly been the main engine for the development and evolution of world religious thought. The great living religions of the world — Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism — did not emerge in cultural vacuums. They grew from, reacted against, absorbed, and transformed the religious materials of the civilizations that surrounded them. From the Hellenistic traditions woven into early Christianity, to the Sumerian influences traceable in the Old Testament's accounts of the flood and the creation, to the Zoroastrian concepts of cosmic dualism that permeate Jewish apocalypticism, the roots of modern religion reach deep into the soil of ancient belief.
Despite the insistence of many that any particular world religion is completely original and without precedent, a serious engagement with those societal traditions from which such religions grew frequently reveals deep cultural grains — absorbed and sometimes renamed, but persistently influential. The purpose of this section is to document the now-extinct religions of the ancient world, to preserve something of their wealth of custom from their surviving documents and monuments, and to help place the roots of modern religious thought in more illuminating context.
Ancient Mesopotamia: Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon
The religious traditions of ancient Mesopotamia — the river valley between the Tigris and Euphrates, in what is today Iraq — are among the oldest for which substantial written evidence survives. The Sumerians, who developed writing itself around 3200 BC, produced an elaborate pantheon of gods presiding over the major forces of nature and civilization: An (sky), Enlil (wind and storm), Enki (water and wisdom), Inanna (love and war). Their myths, preserved on cuneiform clay tablets, include the Epic of Gilgamesh — which contains a flood narrative strikingly parallel to that of the biblical Noah — and the Enuma Elish, a creation epic in which the world is formed from the body of the slain goddess Tiamat.
Babylonian religion, which developed from Sumerian and Akkadian antecedents, emphasized astrological divination, elaborate temple ritual, and a complex underworld theology. The Babylonian akitu (New Year festival) involved the dramatic re-enactment of the creation myth. Scholars have identified numerous points of contact between Babylonian religion and the world of the Hebrew Bible, a connection made plausible by the Babylonian Exile of the sixth century BC, during which Jewish thinkers were in direct contact with Mesopotamian religious thought.
Ancient Egypt
Egyptian religion, practiced for roughly three millennia from the early dynastic period to the Roman era, is one of the most complex and richly documented of the ancient world's religious traditions. Its characteristic features include an enormous and changing pantheon of deities — many depicted with human bodies and animal heads — an elaborate theology of the afterlife centered on the judgment of the dead by the god Osiris, and a royal theology that identified the pharaoh as the earthly manifestation of the sky god Horus.
The Book of the Dead (more precisely, the Book of Coming Forth by Day) is the most widely known of the Egyptian funerary texts, providing spells and guidance for the soul's navigation of the underworld. Earlier funerary texts — the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom and the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom — represent some of the oldest religious literature in human history. The eighteenth dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BC) briefly imposed a radical monotheism centered on the solar disk Aten, an episode that has fascinated scholars as a possible precursor to or influence on Israelite monotheism.
Ancient Greece and Rome
The religious traditions of ancient Greece and Rome exercised a formative influence on Western civilization and on early Christianity in particular. Greek religion centered on a polytheistic pantheon of anthropomorphic deities — Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, and their peers — whose myths were codified in the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod and enacted in civic festivals, oracle consultations, and mystery cults. Greek philosophical theology, developed by thinkers from Xenophanes through Plato and the Stoics, increasingly moved toward monotheism and a transcendent conception of divinity that would profoundly shape Christian and Jewish theology.
The mystery religions of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds — the Eleusinian Mysteries, the cults of Dionysus, Isis, and Mithras — offered initiates personal religious experience, secret knowledge, and hope for a blessed afterlife, anticipating in important ways the appeal of early Christianity. Roman religion absorbed and adapted much of Greek mythology while maintaining its own emphases on civic duty, piety (pietas), and the ritual maintenance of relations with the gods (pax deorum).
Norse and Germanic Religion
The pre-Christian religion of the Norse and Germanic peoples of northern Europe is known primarily through the medieval Icelandic Eddas — the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson (c. 1220 AD) and the Poetic Edda — composed centuries after the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity, but preserving older mythological material. The Norse pantheon is dominated by Odin (god of wisdom, poetry, and death), Thor (thunder), Freya (love and war), and Loki (trickster). The cosmology envisions nine interconnected worlds on the world-tree Yggdrasil, and culminates in Ragnarok — a prophesied apocalyptic battle in which the gods themselves will be destroyed, followed by world renewal.
Why Ancient Religions Matter
The study of ancient and extinct religions is not merely antiquarian. These traditions laid the conceptual and imaginative foundations upon which the living world religions were constructed. They pioneered the great theological questions — the nature of the divine, the problem of evil, the fate of the soul, the structure of the cosmos — that the world religions inherited and transformed. Understanding them illuminates the living traditions and helps place the development of human religious thought in its fullest historical perspective.