Sumer, in the south of what is now Iraq, is celebrated as the region in which writing was invented and the world’s earliest urban civilization developed. Temples, as the institutions within which writing is first attested and as the symbolic centers of cities, played a major role in these developments. In addition, a rich and varied body of religious literature was written in Sumerian, bringing order to the world, explaining events within it, and mediating between the human and divine domains. Temples had interrelated functions as the earthly residences of deities and as administrative centers responsible for receiving and redistributing various types of commodities, and much of the religious literature is inseparably related to concepts of kingship. Sumerian religion thus constitutes a complex nexus of what are, from our perspective, theological, socio-economic, and political concerns.

Briefly it can be described as a polytheistic religion, with a strong belief in the efficacy and necessity of ritual, which expressed human dependence on the divine while at the same time enabling a reciprocal relationship between the two. The principal members of the pantheon were anthropomorphic and had joint roles, on a local level being identified with particular cities and on a regional level contributing to the cultural continuity that united Sumer. The pantheon was fluid and, paralleling the human form of deities, was organized on the same principles as human institutions. It was this fluidity that enabled the pantheon to develop, possibly having its origins in speculation about the physical universe, and subsequently expanding to include deities of pastoral and arable farming, and then of skills such as metal working and writing, as well as of objects symbolizing political status, divine patronage thus stimulating and reinforcing socio-economic and political change.

The term “religion” is employed here in reference to the complex of conceptions concerning the character of parahuman elements in the cosmos and the relationship of men and women to these beings and forces, as well as to the practices by which humans interact with them. Because the Hittites of second-millennium-bce Anatolia, like all the peoples of the ancient Near East, perceived deities, demons, and the spirits of the dead to be involved in the most mundane aspects of existence, religion was for them an integral part of daily life.

As something so imbricated in the quotidian and self-evident to societal contemporaries, religion was seldom the subject of self-conscious reflection or examination in Hatti (as the Hittites referred to their nation and its territory; see Map 2). Accordingly, the Hittites bequeathed to posterity no theological treatises or surveys of their beliefs, and it is therefore necessary for the modern student to reconstruct their religious life from scattered evidence of the most diverse nature.

The religions of ancient Israel and Judah constitute the primary religious foundation for the development of the western monotheistic traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ancient Israelite and Judean religions emerge in the land of Canaan during the late-second millennium bce. They are known primarily through the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which form the Tanakh, the foundational sacred scriptures of Judaism, and the Old Testament, the first portion of the sacred scriptures of Christianity. Archaeological remains and texts from ancient Israel and Judah and the surrounding cultures also supply considerable information.

Israelite and Judean religious traditions focus on the worship of the deity, YHWH, and function especially as national or state religious traditions from the formation of the Israelite monarchy during the twelfth–tenth centuries bce through the subsequent history of the separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah (see Map 4). Although Israel and Judah share the same basic religious tradition based in the worship of YHWH, each appears to have distinctive conceptualizations of YHWH and the means by which YHWH should be represented and worshiped. Unfortunately, literary evidence concerning religion in northern Israel is limited, because most of the Hebrew Bible was written and transmitted by Judean writers and reflects distinctive Judean viewpoints. But the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrian Empire in 722/1 bce, the destruction of the southern kingdom of Judah by the Babylonian Empire in 587/6 bce, and the reconstitution of Judah as a Persian province in the late-sixth through the late-fourth centuries bce prompted the development of Judaism as a monotheistic religion practiced by Jews in the land of Israel itself and throughout the Persian and Greco-Roman world.

In the year 384 CE, the Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus sent this letter to a colleague:

We do not know the nature of the Spoletum prodigy, but communal fears aroused by natural or manmade disasters, such as earthquakes, drought, and military defeats, were the most frequent reasons for the kind of ritual response mentioned by Symmachus. Following traditional practice, Symmachus refers the matter to the colleagues in the senate who, if they deemed it significant, would then consult with the priestly augures or the quindecimviri sacris faciundis to determine the appropriate actions to be undertaken by the priests, magistrates, or people as a whole. It is striking that Symmachus’s concern as well as the mechanisms to address prodigies had remained in place in Rome at least into the late fourth century, some seventy years after the first Christian emperor, Constantine, claimed the city as his own.

Christianity, as Sulpicius Severus observed circa 400, “was taken up rather late across the Alps” (Chron. 2.32.1). Indeed, it was not until the reign of Marcus Aurelius that Gallic Christians entered the literary record. Their first appearance, however, was spectacular, both literally and figuratively, for it occurred in the vivid narrative of persecution that opened book five of Eusebius’s Church History and both followed and illustrated a prominent statement of historiographical intent. Eusebius based his account on a letter written in Greek by “the servants of Christ sojourning in Vienne and Lyon” to “the churches in Asia and Phrygia” whose purpose was to supply a biblical and theological frame for events that had occurred at Lyon circa 177. Excerpted for the purpose of the narrative and significantly redacted, the letter must be read with caution, but even so, like other documents used by Eusebius, it supplies credible details not available elsewhere.

Despite the arrest of some Christians from Vienne (Hist. eccl. 5.1.13), notably “Sanctus, the deacon” (5.1.17) – probably because they were in Lyon at the time – the persecution appears to have arisen from local conditions. As metropolitan capital of Gallia Lugdunensis, site of the altar of Rome and Augustus, and federal capital of the Three Gauls, Lyon was not only an obvious venue for early Christian missionary activity, but also a likely place for confrontation over the state religion. Suspected of atheism and impiety (5.1.9), perhaps in connection with their refusal to participate in celebrations of imperial victory,Christians were barred from public places (5.1.5), denounced to the local authorities (5.1.8), and brought before the governor. He condemned to death those who admitted to being Christians and released those who denied it. Having so far followed the precedent set by Trajan (Pliny the Younger, Ep. 10.97), he then went beyond it by affirmatively searching for Christians (Hist. eccl. 5.1.14).

The term “religion” is oversupplied with meaning. There is no corresponding universal cultural taxon. The inefficiency of cultural recurrence is problematic for meme theories of cultural and religious evolution, despite the notion’s attractive fit with evolutionary biology. Reducing religion to intergroup competition – “a space in which competing sets of social interests meet” – postpones the question of definition indefinitely. A useful taxonomy of religion may be possible, and seems necessary, but is beyond the scope of the present undertaking. Rather than delineate a subspecies “Punic religion,” the following discussion will depend on traditional categories of religious behaviors: sacrifice, offerings, prayer, purity regulations, cultic sites, cultic personnel, festivals, and funerary practices.

The word “Phoenician” derives from phoinīkes, which Homer (Il. 23.744; Od. 13.272; 14.288; 15.415, 419, 473) and later Greek writers used to designate foreign traders from the Levant. The Greek word entered Latin as Poeni, “Punic” being derived from the Latin adjective Punicus. Thus both the Greek and Latin terms label the same group. English uses “Phoenician” to refer to the East and “Punic” for the West, particularly in reference to language. The Phoenician language developed new features in the West, warranting the distinct label Punic. With respect to the practice of religion there are fewer contrasts between East and West, weakening the rationale for distinct labels. Religious practice within the Phoenician and Punic city-states remained largely a matter of local custom.

The history of Christianity in Syria is a story of how this burgeoning religious movement of Late Antiquity came to take on a distinctively regional dress. Effectively a large frontier zone between the Roman and the Parthian (and later the Persian) empires, Syria was exposed to ever-changing cultural and political influences. While Aramaic, with many regional variations, was the dominant language in this milieu, from the late fourth century BCE onward Greek language and culture also gained a powerful presence. From the last third of the second century BCE, local circumstances allowed the development of the semi-independent kingdom of Edessa. Here the cultivation of the native Aramaic dialect eventuated in the appearance of Syriac, an Aramaic idiom that facilitated the growth of a unique Christian identity in cultural terms, defined largely in reaction to and/or in tandem with Greek thought and religious expression. While inscriptions and other archaeological evidence document the beginnings, for the most part the historical evidence is literary.

Edessene Christianity

To the north and east of the Roman province of Syria, beyond the Euphrates and just within the borders of the province of Mesopotamia (Persian Osrhoene), lay the city of Edessa. Founded in 304 BCE by the Greek-speaking Seleucus I Nicator, the name Edessa recalled the city of the same name in Seleucus’s native Macedonia. Syriac-speaking locals, however, have persistently called the city Ûrhāy. In Parthian times, from around the year 132 BCE onward, the city and its associated territories became the kingdom of Edessa, a dignity it preserved until the year 214 CE, when it officially became a Roman colony. In the environs of Edessa, sometime in the early first century CE, developments in the writing of Aramaic began to take the form that in due course would come to be called Syriac. From about the middle of the second century CE until well into Islamic times, Syriac, the standard Aramaic of a large corpus of mostly Christian texts, was, together with Greek, one of the principal vehicles of Christianity in Syria and eastward. Indeed, by the fifth century Syriac and its associated ecclesiastical culture had extended its influence well to the west of the Euphrates.

Modern scholarly understanding of what constituted ancient Assyrian and Babylonian religion is complicated because Assyria and Babylonia were part of the Mesopotamian “stream of tradition” beginning as early as the third millennium bce and continuing through to the first. Second, owing in part to A. Leo Oppenheim’s contention that the history of “Mesopotamian religion” should not be written, religion as a topic has not been thoroughly pursued in the field of Mesopotamian studies. Oppenheim was concerned about the nature of the evidence and “the problem of comprehension across the barriers of conceptual conditioning.” Nonetheless, even Oppenheim proceeded, to some degree, to write a history of Mesopotamian religion.

The world of ancient Assyria and Babylonia (see Map 1) was filled with numerous deities whose importance they could not ignore. The responsibilities and power of these gods shifted over time and varied depending on place, affected too by the changing political situation. At the same time, many fundamental components of ancient Mesopotamian religious life continued unchanged for centuries. The basic premise throughout all periods of Mesopotamian history is that humans were created and placed on earth so the gods did not have to work. Each deity controlled different elements of the world order, no one god had full control, and which deity was in charge fluctuated over time and place, affected by political and social changes.

An account of the religion of the Celts of Western and Central Europe is beset with many difficulties, the most significant being a debate over the existence of “the Celts” as a definable people with a common religious tradition. It is true that modern concepts of the Celts are only perhaps two hundred years old at most; but that a people known as Celts or Keltoi did exist in the ancient world, and that even beyond these tribes were others who had similar language, religion, and art, cannot be disputed. This commonality of culture is the determining factor for scholars in identifying the Celts, whose material remains may be traced from Ireland in the west to Romania and even Turkey in the east, to the north as far as southern Germany, and south to parts of the Iberian Peninsula and to Italy north of the Po River (see Map 10).

Granted this commonality of culture, scholars in search of creating as comprehensive a picture as possible of Celtic religious systems have heavily drawn on archaeological evidence from these regions to supplement the ancient written sources. Apart from the First Botorrita Inscription found in Spain, the Coligny Calendar, and the Chamalières and Larzac Tablets from France (Roman Gaul), some bilingual texts such as the Vercelli Inscription from Italy, and an occasional dedication, there is virtually nothing written by the Celts themselves relating to their religion. Writing had little or no part in their culture, and such inscriptions mostly used the Greek or Latin alphabets. Our main written sources, texts by Greek or Roman authors of the fifth century bce on, were not interested in giving a point of view that might reflect that of those whom they were describing. At best they portray the Celts with a certain sympathy; at worst the emphasis is on their barbarity and their “otherness,” and the ancient exaggerations and fabrications are repeated uncritically by successive writers. For example, the first-century-bce Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (5.32) writes of cannibalism in Ireland, and this is repeated half a century later by Strabo (Geog. 4.5.4) who adds incest to the crimes, although he concedes that he does not have “trustworthy witnesses” for his information.