More decisively than any other event in the country’s history, the surrender of Alexandria to Arab troops in November 641 marked the end of Antiquity in Egypt. Egypt was irrevocably severed from the Hellenistic world to which it had belonged culturally ever since Alexander the Great, and from the Roman empire of which it had been part politically since the reign of Augustus. Long before that crucial event, however, dramatic changes had already transformed the Egyptian landscape. In Alexandria itself around the middle of the fourth century, the Caesareum on the waterfront, completed in the time of Augustus as a temple in his honor, had been converted into the cathedral church of the city’s Christian archbishops. In the far south of the country, in Thebes, the age-old mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahari experienced a different fate. In Ptolemaic and early Roman times, it had housed a thriving healing shrine patronized by the indigenous “saints” Amenhotep, son of Hapu, and Imhotep. In the third and fourth centuries of the common era, part of the temple served as a cemetery; members of the corporation of iron-workers from nearby Hermonthis used another part of the building for social and ritual gatherings, which involved, among other things, the traditional sacrifice of a donkey. At a much later stage, toward the end of the sixth century, it became the core of an impressive monastery. Dedicated to Saint Phoibammon, the monastery dominated the area until its remains were demolished by nineteenth-century archaeologists. A process of irreversible Christianization had, at an unequal pace and with different outcomes, affected both the centers of official ceremony (like Alexandria’s Caesareum) and the shrines that served the needs of local populations (as in Deir el-Bahari).

The conquest of the ancient Near East by Alexander the Great of Macedonia in 333–323 bce constitutes a major turning point in the religious history of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds. Alexander’s conquest marked the first time that a European culture was able to gain political ascendency over the Near East. It presented the opportunity for Alexander and his successors to change profoundly the religious landscape of the ancient world through the promotion of Greek or Hellenistic culture and religion as the ideal form of human life. The introduction of Hellenization to the ancient Near Eastern world laid the groundwork for major change in the religions of the ancient world insofar as the melding of Hellenistic and Near Eastern cultures and religions ultimately produced forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that now constitute the major religious traditions of the western world.

Interpreters of religion have had a mixed reaction to the religious impact of Alexander’s conquest of the ancient Near East. On the one hand, many scholars hail the Hellenistic period as a time of great progress in which the light of Hellenistic culture, particularly its values, awakened the ancient Near Eastern world, enabling it to pursue new forms of human religious, cultural, and political expression and achievement. Indeed, Greek thought is widely recognized as the one of the primary foundations for the western intellectual tradition. On the other hand, many other scholars view the promotion of Hellenization as an effort to subvert the nations and cultures that now came under Greek rule and to mold them into a relatively cohesive culture that would serve its new Hellenistic masters. Indeed, the Romans, who were always well known for their willingness to learn the lessons of their predecessors, likewise employed Hellenization as an important tool and weapon to serve their own efforts to unite and dominate the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds.

Introduction

Rich in natural resources and strategically located at the crossroads of the ancient world’s civilizations, Iran has always been a sought-after prize for conquerors. Its history is thus one of both conquests and migrations, with many peoples and tribal federations entering the Iranian plateau in search of living space and pasture grounds. But human activity is only partly responsible for the great destruction that Iran has endured over its long history. Equally important are the earthquakes and other natural disasters that have engulfed the region periodically, often with devastating consequences, to which slow patterns of aridification and, locally, salination have further contributed. Given its complicated socio-ethnic and natural history, it is hardly surprising that the cultural and religious history of pre-Islamic Iran is difficult to write.

To understand the religious history of the region, we must also take account of the attitude toward writing shown by the Iranian peoples who dominated the area. When the Achaemenid Persians gained control of much of the ancient world, the flourishing civilizations that they encountered employed writing for various purposes: administration, scholarship, religion, and literature. While they retained local administrative practices in those parts of the empire that had a functioning bureaucracy (for example, Babylonia and Elam, the heart of the empire), the lingua franca of the new imperial bureaucracy was Aramaic. For this administration, they relied initially on Aramaean scribes, who eventually taught their craft to local, Iranian-speaking boys, especially in the outlying parts of the empire. This practice, already attested in the names of scribes found in a recently discovered fourth-century BCE archive from Bactria, is especially visible a few centuries later, after the conquests of Alexander and the collapse of Seleucid rule over Iran and Central Asia. Independently, some of the former provinces of the Achaemenid empire continued to use Aramaic scribal conventions, but this time in Iranian languages: Parthian, Sogdian, and Khwarezmian. We have to assume, therefore, that in the brief period of Macedonian and Seleucid rule over Iran, the traditional (Achaemenid) system of administration coexisted with a new administration in Greek.

The narrow belt of habitable lands that lines the southern shores of the Mediterranean – between Libya in the East and Morocco in the West – has always been an insular world. From their perspective, the Arab geographers logically named these lands the Jazirat al-Maghrib, the “Island of the West.” The countries that make up North Africa today are thus collectively called “the Maghrib.” The flow of sea currents and the predominant winds, the hard and rugged barrier formed by the coastal mountains, and a location between the world’s largest desert and its largest inland sea, have produced a peculiar mix of connectivity and isolation that has affected both ideas and economies. While moderating the exposure of its inhabitants to influences from elsewhere in the Mediterranean, these same forces have also promoted the rapid development of outside ideas and practices once they have entered North Africa.

One result of this double heritage of relative isolation and internalized intensity was the emergence of a bewildering variety, range, and localized identity of religious ritual and practice among Africans before the arrival of Christianity. In an area larger than that of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas combined, every environmental niche as small as a village or a valley came to have its own spirits, deities, rituals, and festivals. The practices and beliefs were so integrated into the life of each ethnic people, village, cultural or occupational group that they formed an almost out-of-mind part of daily routine. On the other hand, amid all this fragmentation and multiplicity, there was sufficient contact to encourage the formation of strands of unity that can be traced between Africa and the Mediterranean world of which it was part. When a Christian empire during the later fourth century CE began to threaten the local festivals, pilgrimages, parades, and other performances, it was apprehension over the loss of this vital core of everyday life that provoked distress as much as any danger to deeply held beliefs.

The Egypt of the Bible, the Pharaohs, and the Persians

For the period of time from Abraham to Moses, we know the point at which ancient Israel took root in the Egyptian past. The Bible recounts a long sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt, leading to the foundational events of Judaism: the Exodus, the giving of the Law, and the Mosaic covenant. For the historian, however, it is not an easy task to reconcile the biblical narrative with the historical and archaeological data now made available by Egyptology. The Bible and Egyptian hieroglyphs do not speak the same language. Points of intersection between the Egypt of the Bible and the Egypt of Egyptologists are both rare and a matter of dispute.

The Egypt of the Bible is a reasonably accurate reflection of the various features of society in the Egyptian New Kingdom. History and archaeology allow us to verify its account with a certain degree of probability. Thus, the travails of the Hebrews described in the book of Exodus correlate with the projects undertaken in the Delta by the pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The strict supervision of the workers, against which Moses revolts, today finds confirmation in Egyptian documents originating from a village laborer of Deir el-Medina. This applies equally to quotas of bricks, the use of straw, and the allotment of vacation days. All of this was part of everyday life in Egypt of the thirteenth century BCE. In the ranks of the royal court, the figure of Aper-El, a Semite identified as vizier of Amenophis III, can be considered as a “prototype” of the biblical Joseph. His success demonstrates that foreigners, who had either moved to Egypt or who had been born into an immigrant community in Egypt, could rise to high-ranking positions, including high office in the Egyptian court.

If Greek culture is late compared to the city-states and empires of the Ancient Near East, Roman culture is late and peripheral to Greek culture. It entered the international stage by the very end of the sixth century bce, but contemporary literary sources or reliable later accounts are not available before the second half of the third or fourth century bce. By this time, the Romans and their allies’ armies started to build an empire that comprised the whole of the Mediterranean and much of its hinterland, that is, the whole of western Europe including Britain and much of southeastern Europe, including modern Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and Asia Minor as far as Armenia by the beginning of the second century ce. Rome defended a hostile borderline against the Sassanian Persian empire and influenced political and cultural patterns throughout its realm with lasting effects for two millennia. It is this later history that accounts for an interest in Rome’s origins. But such an interest must be disappointed here. Nothing supports the assumption that any of the religious elements from the period before the fourth century bce should be part of a causal explanation of the later expansion of the city-state into a world empire.

History of Scholarship

The bases of Minoan religion were set by the excavator of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941). Evans realized at once that he was unearthing a magnificent civilization that, although under the strong influence of Egypt, had never become enslaved to it and had thus managed to maintain its own cultural identity (see Map 6). It was a highly literate culture with two different hieroglyphic and two Linear scripts (Hieroglyphic A and B, Linear A and B). The fact that all but Linear B remain undeciphered is an accident of history due to the dearth of preserved materials. There may be little doubt, however, that Minoan culture had myths and ritual texts of which we are unfortunately ignorant due to the perishable nature of the material on which they were written. Such texts would have helped better to elucidate Minoan religion.

As a consequence of this lack of evidence, Evans had to create his own narrative about Minoan mythology based partly on intuition, partly on observance, partly on projection of Greek myth backward, and partly on his solid knowledge of Egypt and the Near East. His basic assumptions as regards Minoan religion were three: (1) Early Crete had aniconic cults. (2) The aniconic objects as well as trees were possessed by the spirits of the divinity. For this idea he was indebted to Edward B. Tylor’s theory of animism. (3) The principal goddess of the Minoans was a Great Mother, as he called her. He detected her on the images on seals and wall paintings. Next to her often stood a youthful god, which he sometimes called the goddess’s consort, but most times he identified him as her son. A most important observation of Evans is that Minoan religion may be elucidated through comparisons with Egypt and the Near East. The Minoan Goddess was similar to Hathor. She was the dominant deity in the pantheon, and thus Minoan religion was virtually monotheistic. Moreover it was a palatial religion; the Great Goddess was also the protectress of the king.

Introduction

Zoroastrianism (also called Mazdaism) was the religion of peoples speaking Iranian languages who, coming from Central Asia circa 1000 bce, settled on the Iranian Plateau. Iranian languages are related to the Indo-Aryan languages (Sanskrit, etc.), and the common proto-Indo-Iranian language may have been spoken by peoples inhabiting the area south and southeast of the Aral Sea, who split into Iranians and Indo-Aryans around 2000 bce. Archaeology has revealed dense settlements in this area of Central Asia, but attempts to correlate them, especially the so-called Bactrian-Margiana Archeological Complex circa 2200–1700 bce, with the people among whom Zoroastrianism originated remain inconclusive because of the lack of written testimonies.

The Zoroastrian sacred texts collected in the Avesta were composed orally between circa 1500 and 500 bce, but they contain no historical information about the Iranian people who created them. The geographical horizon of the composers of the Avesta spans the area from the modern Central Asian republics, through what is modern Afghanistan, to the Helmand River basin, reflecting their southward migration. Since the Iranians did not use writing, the archaeological records from the areas they may have occupied can be only tentatively correlated with them. Thus, the historical-cultural settings of the various stages of the religion of the Iranians before the Achaemenids (550–331 bce) cannot be determined.