The new religious systems provided foundations of cultural communication, moral expectation, and personal trust among people who were meeting, sharing ideas, and doing business with one another far beyond their local neighborhoods. As a result of increasing commercial and cultural interaction between people across this large area, religions were shared.

One possibility is that by about 100 BCE, the population in Afro-Eurasia had climbed to over a million. Since people do not appear to have lacked for religious life on a local scale from very early times, why did several large-scale belief systems emerge between 1200 BCE and 700 CE? In fact, why did all the major world religions appear in that era? In fact, these religions have survived for thousands of years, and all of them seem to have developed around the same time. But the world religions I know of - Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam - were bigger than a single city or even a single region of the world. Having examined some early writing from the city of Sumer in Mesopotamia, I know that people had already conceived of gods that looked out for them and the welfare of their crops and cities. I know that by 1200 BCE, there were developed cities in most parts of the world. Having done some research on the common features of early agrarian cities, I’m interested in finding out why all civilizations adopted some sort of religion and how these religions spread over vast regions.

Religion why did you tell me meme