Page 256 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

religion—overview 1557

A highly decorated Hindu
processional cart in India.

with Rome in the fourth century
BCE, the Roman rulers increasingly
came to be treated as divine agents
worthy of worship.They, in turn, in-
voked some of the gods, offering
them sacrifice of animals. Culturally
open to other influences, they also
welcomed Isis, the mother-god from
Egypt, who ruled the universe, and
Mithras, the sun-god from Persia.
Much more complex was the arrival
of Jews from Palestine and, from
within their Judaism, a new sect that
the Romans soon learned to name
“Christian.”
The Roman Republic came to be
the Roman Empire in the centuries
in which Judaism and Christianity
came to be a presence. Together
these two also became “world reli-
gions,” dynamic inheritances from a
five-hundred-year period in world
history that saw special creativity
and devotion.Webbed at the begin-
ning and conflicted by the end of
give it practical effect among the people he dominated. the first century CE, Judaism and Christianity also
Hinduism, after early prosperity, languished but was demand separate treatment by scholars of religion.
periodically revivified. Buddhists meanwhile spread their Hebrew people—their name refers to their having
self-disciplined ways of life into China and Japan, even- wandered—told themselves that they were people who
tual and virtual home bases for one of what came to be came from slavery in Egypt.They had seen glories, begin-
called “the world religions.” ning with their conquest of many small ethnic groups in
Palestine, and kingship beginning around 1000 BCE.
Developments Called “Greco-Roman,” They revered the memory of charismatic rulers such as
Jewish, and Christian David, who captured his capital city of Jerusalem, and
Greek and Roman cultures survived in the centuries of then his son Solomon, a temple-builder there. The
great cultural productivity. Philosopher Karl Jaspers temple-goers and their priests and scribes recounted and
spoke of the centuries between 700 BCE to 200 BCE as an lived by stories of their freedom from slavery, their wan-
“axial period,” a time of religious formation and creativ- dering in a wilderness, and their conquest in Canaan, on
ity, and these dates are commonly accepted.This is often the soil of Palestine.
marked in Greek drama and Roman poetry as well as in Among their stories, one that inspired much of their
the records of statecraft.While honor was shown the old moral concern and many of their religious rites was one
Greek gods in the course of developments associated about Moses, a leader who helped free them from slavery,