Religion has existed for as long as humans have sought to understand whether human life has deeper purposes. As long as 100,000 years ago, primitive people buried their dead in marked graves, together with tools, weapons, and animal bones, an indication that these people believed that life continued, in some form, after death. Experts have yet to discover an ancient civilization that was nonreligious. Although beliefs and methods of worship differed, people of every civilization in the ancient world asked questions—and provided similar answers—about the force or forces that created and controlled the world.
The Earliest Idea of God
By 15,000 BCE people were drawing imagesb on cave walls. These caves were not dwellings; some experts believe they were seen as places where people could commune with higher beings. The remarkable cave paintings discovered in Lascaux in France in 1940 show one of these higher beings, a shadowy figure who is half human and half stag. Other figures in the cave, hunters in masks, suggest that the drawers saw a connection between the hunters and an invisible, magical world.
By 4000 BCE the idea of supernatural beings controlling the natural world had taken root and strengthened. A carved soapstone seal found in Mohenjo Daro, in the Indus valley, shows a holy being sitting cross-legged in thought, an early form of the god that would one day be known as Shiva, one of the three most important gods of Hinduism.
Sumerian Religion
By 2250 BCE the people of ancient Sumer had a pantheon (a collection of gods). Each god represented one or more elements of nature. The Sumerians had a god of the air, a god of the sea, a god of the plow, and a goddess of love and war.
The Sumerians’ religion was far more advanced than those of other ancient peoples. They spent more public money than any other nation of the time on building temples, called ziggurats. The sacrifices they made to their gods included offering the blood of people and animals.
The Sumerians believed that they had been created to serve the gods and that when they died, they went to a gloomy underworld, where everyone was sad for all eternity. Their religious festivals enacted the story of creation, one of the first attempts by human beings to explain their origin. The king was seen as the high priest of the country. He was surrounded by priests, who were respected and feared by the people because they were thought to possess magical powers.
Ancient Egyptian Religion
The ancient Egyptians also believed that religion, magic, and nature were linked. Religion pervaded every aspect of Egyptian life. It has been estimated that there were over one thousand Egyptian gods. In the early stages of Egyptian civilization, many gods were animal deities; they symbolized different aspects of the natural world.
As Egyptian society became more sophisticated, its gods took on more humanlike qualities. One of the Egyptians’ most beloved goddesses was Isis, who was revered as a mother figure. By Egypt’s late period (around 750 BCE) Isis had taken on many of the qualities of Hathor, who was the goddess of love.
Egyptians worried about what would happen to their soul after death. One of the main concerns of their religion was preparation for the afterlife.
