Where Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam and Shinto took shape — and how they spread across the map.
Stop 01 · c. 1500–1200 BCE
The Vedas of Ancient India
Hinduism has no single founder. Its oldest scriptures, the four Vedas, were composed in an early form of Sanskrit in northern India, and the oldest of them, the Rigveda, took shape in the Punjab between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE. Its 1,028 hymns, arranged in ten books, praise gods such as Agni, the god of fire, and Indra. Around 1200 BCE the centre of Vedic culture moved east into what is now Uttar Pradesh. Priests learned the hymns by heart and passed them on with remarkable accuracy for more than a thousand years before they were written down. From Vedic ritual grew a family of traditions centred on ideas such as dharma, karma and rebirth.
Srirangam Ranganathaswamy Temple, dedicated to the Hindu deity Vishnu, is said to be worshiped by Ikshvaku (and the descendants of Ikshvaku Vamsam).N. Vivekananthamoorthy · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
Vedic culture moves east, from c. 1200 BCE · Spread of ideas
Hinduism has no single founder. Its oldest scriptures, the four Vedas, were composed in an early form of Sanskrit in northern India, and the oldest of them, the Rigveda, took shape in the Punjab between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE. Its 1,028 hymns, arranged in ten books, praise gods such as Agni, the god of fire, and Indra. Around 1200 BCE the centre of Vedic culture moved east into what is now Uttar Pradesh. Priests learned the hymns by heart and passed them on with remarkable accuracy for more than a thousand years before they were written down. From Vedic ritual grew a family of traditions centred on ideas such as dharma, karma and rebirth.
In the hill country of Canaan, the Israelites, who most scholars think emerged from within Canaan itself, came to worship a single god, Yahweh. In 597 BCE, after Judah revolted, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II took Jerusalem and deported around 7,000 people. In 587 BCE his army returned, destroyed the city and its temple, and took many more of the elite into exile. Without a temple, the exiles kept the Sabbath and their law at home. After Cyrus the Great of Persia took Babylon in 539 BCE, many returned, and a second temple was finished by 515 BCE. Scribes gathered and edited the texts that became the Hebrew Bible, the foundation of Judaism and later of Christianity and Islam.
The prophet Zarathustra, known to the Greeks as Zoroaster, is credited with the Gathas, hymns in Avestan, an old Iranian language that points to a homeland somewhere in the eastern Iranian lands. His dates are uncertain: tradition puts him in the 6th century BCE, but most scholars place him much earlier, perhaps around 1000 BCE. He taught of a cosmic struggle between truth and falsehood, judgement after death, and a single wise god, Ahura Mazda. Zoroastrianism became the official religion of the Achaemenid kings; at Behistun, Darius the Great proclaimed that he ruled by Ahura Mazda's grace. The Sasanian Empire later revived and standardised it, and its ideas may have influenced Judaism and Christianity.
In the Ganges valley, Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, taught a path out of suffering through ethics, meditation and insight. By Buddhist tradition he was born at Lumbini, in today's Nepal, into the ruling family of the Shakya people, and left home to wander as an ascetic. He reached awakening at Bodh Gaya and first taught in the Deer Park at Sarnath, near Varanasi. For decades he taught in the kingdom of Magadha and its neighbours, building a monastic order, and he died, tradition says aged 80, at Kushinagar. Tradition places his life in the 6th century BCE; many scholars now put his death around 400 BCE. His teachings were passed on by memory and written down only centuries later.
In the same kingdoms of the Ganges valley lived Vardhamana, known as Mahavira, the 24th and last of the teachers Jains call tirthankaras. Jains see him not as their faith's founder but as the one who renewed it, succeeding Parshvanatha. Born at Kundagrama near Vaishali, he gave up his possessions at about 30 and spent twelve and a half years in meditation and severe austerity before attaining omniscience. For 30 years he taught that every living thing has a soul, and that freedom from rebirth comes through strict non-violence (ahimsa), truthfulness and giving up attachment to possessions. He died at Pawapuri, in 527 BCE by tradition, though many historians place it later. Jainism has four to five million followers today.
In the small Chinese state of Lu, one of many that owed loyalty in name to the Zhou kings, Confucius (traditionally 551–479 BCE) taught that good government and a good life rested on virtue, ritual and respect within the family. Born Kong Qiu near Qufu, he held office only briefly, rising to Minister of Crime, and left Lu in 497 BCE after failing to tear down the strongholds of three powerful noble families. Until 484 BCE he travelled between rival courts such as Wey, Song, Chen and Cai, seeking a ruler who would take his advice. His disciples later gathered his sayings as the Analects, the basis of Chinese education and government for two thousand years.
Daoism grew from the same age of competing schools in China. Tradition credits the sage Laozi, said to have kept the archives at the Zhou royal court in Confucius's time, with the Daodejing, a short book about the Dao or 'Way' that underlies all things. Legend says he wrote it for the guard of the Hangu Pass before leaving for the west, though scholars think it was compiled over a longer period. With the writings of Zhuangzi (born around 369 BCE), it urged harmony with nature and doing without forcing. Daoism later became an organised religion, with priests, temples and scriptures, beginning in 142 CE, when Zhang Daoling founded the Way of the Celestial Masters in what is now Sichuan.
Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in Roman Judaea, most likely in 30 or 33 CE, after being sentenced by the governor Pontius Pilate. His followers spread the faith through the cities of the empire; Paul, a convert, made three missionary journeys and wrote letters to churches from Thessalonica to Rome. Persecution came in waves, the harshest beginning under Diocletian in 303. In 313 at Milan the emperors Constantine and Licinius agreed to tolerate Christians, legalising the faith, and in 325 Constantine called the Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed. On 27 February 380 Theodosius I and his co-emperors issued the Edict of Thessalonica, making Nicene Christianity the Roman Empire's official religion.
Over many centuries the Vedic tradition grew into what is now called Hinduism. The great epics, the Mahabharata (which contains the Bhagavad Gita) and the Ramayana, took shape between roughly 400 BCE and 400 CE, and the Puranas told the stories of gods such as Vishnu, Shiva and the goddess Devi. Under the Gupta kings of the 4th to 6th centuries, worship turned to stone. At Udayagiri, near Vidisha, caves bearing inscriptions from the reign of Chandragupta II hold a monumental relief of Vishnu as the boar Varaha, rescuing the earth goddess. The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, built around 500 CE, is one of the earliest surviving Hindu stone temples. Devotion to a chosen god (bhakti) became central to worship.
Around 610 CE, Muhammad reported receiving in a cave near Mecca the first of the revelations later collected as the Qur'an; from 613 he preached them publicly. Opposition drove him and his followers to Medina in 622, the hijra that begins the Islamic calendar. At the end of 629 he marched on Mecca with 10,000 men and took it almost unopposed; he died in Medina in 632. Within a century, Umayyad caliphs ruling from Damascus held lands from Spain and the Maghreb to Central Asia and Sindh on the Indus. Christians remained a majority of their subjects, keeping their faith in return for a tax, the jizya, while Islam and the Arabic language, law and learning spread.
In Japan, the worship of kami, the spirits of nature, places and ancestors, is known as Shinto. It has no founder; its rites are much older than writing in Japan. The Kojiki (712), compiled according to its preface by the courtier Ō no Yasumaro for Empress Genmei, and the Nihon Shoki (720), both made for the Yamato court, recorded the myths that traced the imperial family to the sun goddess Amaterasu, whose main shrine is at Ise. Buddhism arrived from the Korean kingdom of Baekje in the mid-6th century; the Nihon Shoki gives the date 552. Practised alongside Shinto, it was closely intertwined with it for over a thousand years, until the Meiji government began separating the two in 1868.
Traders, monks and missionaries carried religions far from home. Buddhism reached Han China along the Silk Road around the 1st century CE, helped by An Shigao's first translations of its texts into Chinese, and travelled on to Korea and Japan. Islam crossed the Sahara with caravans to kingdoms like Mali, whose ruler Mansa Musa made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 and helped make Timbuktu a centre of Islamic learning. It also sailed with merchants to Southeast Asia, where Samudera Pasai in northern Sumatra became a Muslim kingdom from the late 13th century. Christianity spread north through Europe; around 988, Vladimir of Kyiv was baptised. By 1300 the world's religious map looked broadly as it would for centuries.