Religions from Prehistory to 600 BCE - AP World History

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all Abrahamic religions, meaning they all share Abraham as an important prophet.

Dharmic religions are Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism; dharma is a complicated metaphysical concept, important to all these religions, that has to do with proper balance in the universe.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam aren't secular philosophies because they have a supernatural component.

While there are many different ways to practice Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they all affirm the existence of a deity, therefore they are all theistic religions.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all monotheistic faiths; Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in one God, not many such as in a polytheistic religion.

Tutankhamun is most famous for his legacy as a mummy in an undisturbed tomb. He also, however, restored the polytheistic Egyptian religion that his father, Akhenaten, had controversially overhauled into a monotheistic, heliocentric religion.

Indigenous Roman myths were largely restricted to legends regarding the founding of Rome itself and its powerful families; myths on other subjects are almost always the result of influence from other cultures.

In Roman legend, one of the founders of Rome was a refugee from the Trojan war, Aeneas, but this means that Rome couldn't have been an ally of Troy because Rome was founded after Troy was destroyed.

Characterizing Greeks as exotic, emotional, and vastly different from Romans became a standard feature of Roman culture after the Roman Empire had expanded into Greece. The original, indigenous myths of Rome, therefore, did not revolve around stereotypes about Greeks.

The original Roman myths have no concept of a forthcoming apocalypse.

Heaven is not a concept found in early Roman myths, rather their ideas of the afterlife were largely influenced by Greek religion.

According to Roman myth, Romulus and Remus were born to Mars, the god of war, and a human mother whose father was the last king of the Albans.

Romulus and Remus were supposedly suckled by a she-wolf, but she was not their mother.

Unlike the religious figure of Jesus, Romulus and Remus were not said to be conceived from a virgin birth.

Unlike the religious figure of Buddha, Romulus and Remus were not said to have been raised in a pleasure palace.

Romulus and Remus's father was a god, not a carpenter.

In late Egyptian prehistory, as agricultural techniques became more refined allowing for food surpluses, evidence of ritualized concepts of death and the afterlife are increasingly found in tombs and other archaeological sites.

Egyptian tombs were never originally homes.

Ancient Egyptian polytheism died out before the Islamic period.

Although in civilizations like China, tombs of powerful people were sometimes filled with their living servants, archaeological finds do not exhibit many examples of such behavior in ancient Egypt.

Unlike the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the neighboring Mesopotamian region, the Nile River has not shifted dramatically over the course of human history.

Ancient Southeast Asian religion was highly influenced by indigenous Indian religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Ancient Southeast Asian religion is Dharmic, just as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Indigenous Russian religions did not influence Southeast Asian religion; and neither did indigenous religions from Madagascar, North America, or North Africa.

Similar to ancient Greek religion, in which gods and goddesses lived in temples, such as Pegasus, the flying horse, who was said to live in a stable in Athens, traditional Hinduism holds temples to be the homes for supernatural beings.

While Hinduism may celebrate the natural world, temples are considered by many Hindu theologians and worshippers as places worthy of worship.

In Buddhism, rather than Hinduism, temples are usually considered by the clerical authority for laypeople to enjoy, as the more religiously orthodox understand that meditation and inaction bring about enlightenment, not extravagant temples.

Unlike in Mayan or Aztec culture, Hindu temples were not sports venues.

In Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim Salafist nations, ancient archaeological sites, such as temples or graveyards, are destroyed in a systematic process by the state government; no Hindu-style government has such a policy.

Dharma is a complex theological concept that is difficult to explain, but it basically entails a belief in fate, proper conduct, and correct action, rather than a monotheistic deity.

Jainism teaches that dharma requires renunciation of violence; liberation is derived from peace and harmlessness.

Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Samaritanism are known as Abrahamic religions; they're all derived from the prophet Abraham, and they all mandate worship of a monotheistic deity.

In Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, Mt. Meru is a mountain range of five peaks considered the spiritual center of the world.

Jannah is a Muslim conception of heaven.

Mt. Fuji is a large mountain in Japan; it holds some spiritual significance to Shintoism, or Japanese folklore religion.

The Fortunate Isles are an important spiritual location in ancient Greek pagan cosmology.

As the political center of the Delian league, the island of Delos was an important location for ancient Hellenic politics.

Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious festival in which Hindu pilgrims travel from all over the world to ritually bathe in the Ganges River.

Visiting the holy city of Mecca is a religious pilgrimage for Muslims, not Hindus.

Jerusalem is a site of spiritual and religious significance for Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Mormons, as well as other religious groups, engage in religious missions, but the Kumbh Mela festival isn't focussed on proselytizing.

Some Hindus become ascetics, giving up their worldly possessions except for loincloths and begging bowls, but the Kumbh Mela festival isn't specifically an ascetic event.

Mummification refers to the ancient Egyptian process of preserving a body for burial. Mummification involved removing organs, drying them out, and wrapping the body in cloth. The purpose of mummification was to preserve the body for use in the afterlife. At first only the Pharaoh was mummified, but later it became an essential part of Egyptian culture and religious experience for most members of society.

The ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife that would be almost identical to life on Earth. They believed that they would be able to take their earthly possessions with them and make use of them in the afterlife. This belief was so ingrained that some rulers would be buried with their pets, slaves, even wives, so that they might be with them in the afterlife.

The Vedas are a collection of Hindu hymns, rituals and religious guidelines written during the Vedic Age of Indian history. The Vedas are thought to be the revelations of enlightened individuals and are the foundation upon which orthodox Hindu philosophy rests.

The Vedic Age is a period of Indian history that began with the arrival of the Aryans in India (approximately 1,500 BCE) and ended a millennium later. The Vedic Age is so named because this is the period of Indian history when the Vedas, the oldest preserved Hindu scriptures, were composed.

Zoroastrianism was the primary religion of the Persian Empire. It was founded by Zoroaster, sometimes called Zarathustra, sometime in antiquity. The first recorded mentions of Zoroastrianism appear in the early years of the First Persian Empire, circa 550 BCE. Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion, perhaps the world’s first.

Zoroaster, sometimes called Zarathustra, founded Zoroastrianism - the state religion of the Persian Empire.

Many paleolithic societies practiced animism, this means that they believed everything in the world around them was imbued with a soul. In the contemporary world there are still many examples of beliefs that fall under the category of animism.

Ahura Mazda is the name of the monotheistic God of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is one of the earliest monotheistic religions in the world. It emerged in Persia sometime around 1,000 BCE and soon became the dominant religion of this part of the world. There remain a few million practitioners of Zoroastrianism in the world, mostly concentrated in modern-day Iran and Pakistan.

While all of the governments listed above justified their rule with religion, the Zhou dynasty was the first dynasty to claim that Tien, or heaven, had abandoned a previous ruling order (the Shang) to take over.