Religion & ideology

At Shanidar Cave in the Zagros mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, excavations led by Ralph Solecki between 1951 and 1960 uncovered the remains of ten Neanderthal men, women and children.

In 1968 the geologist Jim Bowler found burnt and crushed human bones eroding from the lunette dunes of dry Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes region of southeastern Australia.

Carved from a single mammoth tusk and recovered in fragments from the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany, the Löwenmensch ('Lion-Man') depicts a standing human body with the head of a cave lion.

At Sungir, near Vladimir about 200 km east of Moscow, excavators uncovered some of the most lavish burials of the Upper Palaeolithic, calibrated to roughly 34,000–30,000 years ago.

In a cave at Hilazon Tachtit in the Galilee, a Late Natufian community some 12,000 years ago staged an elaborate funeral for a small, elderly, physically disabled woman, interpreted by excavators as one of the earliest shamans known from…

During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) in the Levant, villagers developed a striking mortuary practice: removing the skulls of selected dead, modelling lifelike faces over the bone with lime plaster, inlaying the eye sockets with shell…

At Uruk the Sumerians raised a high mud-brick platform in the Anu district and crowned it with the whitewashed sanctuary known to archaeologists as the White Temple, an early example of the stepped temple-platform tradition that would…

Toward the end of the Fifth Dynasty, the burial chamber of the pharaoh Unas at Saqqara was inscribed with a corpus of about 283 spells now known as the Pyramid Texts, the earliest version of a tradition that would appear in nine late Old…

King Ur-Nammu of the Third Dynasty of Ur ordered the construction of the Great Ziggurat of Ur, a massive stepped temple platform dedicated to Nanna (Sin), the moon god and patron deity of the city.

During the Classic Kerma period (c. 1750–1500 BCE), the Kushite kingdom at Kerma reached its political height while Egypt was fragmented during its Second Intermediate Period.

In the early Vedic period the hymns of the Rigveda, the oldest of the four Vedas and one of the oldest religious texts in any Indo-European language, were composed in archaic Sanskrit.

The pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten, overturned Egypt's traditional polytheism in favour of the exclusive worship of the Aten, the visible sun-disk.

The boy-king Tutankhaten, who took the throne as a child around 1332 BCE, reversed the Atenist revolution of his predecessor Akhenaten.

The Enuma Elish ('When on high'), a creation epic of roughly a thousand lines on seven cuneiform tablets, narrates how the world arose from primordial waters, how generational conflict among the gods culminated in the young storm-god…

The Iranian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) preached a reformed religion centred on a single supreme creator god, Ahura Mazda, and an ethical-cosmic dualism between Asha (truth and right order) and Druj (the lie and chaos), in which human…

According to the Hebrew Bible, King Solomon built the First Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, traditionally completing it around 957 BCE (Josephus and the conventional regnal chronology place construction c. 966–957 BCE).

High in the Peruvian Andes at about 3,150 metres, between the Cordillera Blanca and Cordillera Negra, the ceremonial centre of Chavín de Huántar was founded around 900 BCE and grew into the focal sanctuary of the Chavín culture, the first…

As San Lorenzo declined, the Olmec centre of La Venta rose to prominence around 900 BCE on an island amid the swamps of the Gulf Coast lowlands of Tabasco, remaining the dominant Olmec city until its abandonment about 400 BCE.

According to the Hebrew Bible, during repairs to the Jerusalem Temple in the eighteenth year of King Josiah of Judah (c.

After Judah's king Zedekiah rebelled against Babylonian overlordship, Nebuchadnezzar II besieged Jerusalem and, in 587/586 BCE, captured and razed the city, destroying Solomon's Temple (the First Temple).

According to Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563-483 BCE), a prince of the Shakya clan who had renounced worldly life, attained enlightenment while meditating beneath a pipal tree (the 'Bodhi tree') at Uruvela, present-day Bodh…

Vardhamana Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last Tirthankara of the current Jain cosmic cycle, died (attained moksha) according to Svetambara tradition at Pava in modern Bihar around 527 BCE.

Around the middle of the 3rd century BCE, the Torah was translated from Hebrew into Koine Greek at Alexandria, the first portion of what became the Septuagint.

According to Theravada tradition, around 250 BCE the emperor Ashoka convened the Third Buddhist Council at his capital Pataliputra under the presidency of the elder Moggaliputta Tissa, to purge heterodox doctrines and standardise the…

Around the mid-3rd century BCE the Mauryan emperor Ashoka commissioned the original Great Stupa at Sanchi, in present-day Madhya Pradesh, marking one of the earliest surviving monuments of Buddhist architecture in India.

Under Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE), and guided by the scholar Dong Zhongshu, the Han court adopted Confucianism as the empire's official ideology.

During the reign of King Vattagamani Abhaya (Valagamba) of Anuradhapura, Buddhist monks of the Mahavihara tradition convened what Theravada tradition calls the Fourth Buddhist Council and, for the first time, committed the Pali Canon…

Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher and healer in Roman Judaea, was crucified in Jerusalem under the prefect Pontius Pilate around 30 CE (some scholars argue for 33 CE), during the festival of Passover.

Around 49-50 CE, leaders of the early Christian movement met in Jerusalem to resolve a fundamental dispute: whether non-Jewish (Gentile) converts had to be circumcised and keep the full Mosaic Law.

Tradition holds that Buddhism entered China during the reign of Emperor Ming of the Eastern Han dynasty, prompted by a dream in which the emperor saw a radiant golden figure later identified as the Buddha.

During the First Jewish–Roman War, the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian, besieged Jerusalem from spring to late summer 70 CE.

The Manusmriti, or Manava-Dharmashastra (Laws of Manu), is the most influential of the Hindu Dharmashastra legal-religious treatises, with its received metrical text generally dated by scholars to between 200 BCE and 200 CE and often…

From around the turn of the Common Era, the maritime and continental polities of Southeast Asia entered the cultural orbit of the Indian subcontinent in a process that the French scholar George Coedes termed "Indianisation." Carried…

In 142 CE, the Daoist adept Zhang Daoling proclaimed that the deified Laozi (Taishang Laojun) had descended to him atop Mount Heming in present-day Sichuan, establishing a new covenant between the true gods of the Dao and humanity and…

Around the middle of the second century CE, the South Indian Buddhist monk and philosopher Nagarjuna (c. 150 – c.

Around 200 CE, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (Judah the Prince), the leading sage and patriarch of Jewish Palestine, redacted and compiled the Mishnah, the first authoritative written codification of the Oral Torah.

Around 240-241 CE the Parthian-Iranian prophet Mani (216-274 CE) began publicly proclaiming a new universal religion in the Sasanian Empire of Persia.

On 28 October 312 CE Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, where Maxentius drowned in the Tiber; the victory left Constantine master of the western empire.

In the early-to-mid 4th century the Aksumite king Ezana, ruler of a powerful trading state centred on the Ethiopian highlands and astride the Red Sea routes between Rome and India, converted to Christianity — making Aksum one of the first…

The emperor Constantine summoned and presided over the opening of the First Council of Nicaea, gathering roughly 220 to 300 bishops from across the empire at Nicaea in Bithynia (modern Iznik, Turkey).

On 27 February 380 CE the emperors Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian II issued the Edict of Thessalonica (Cunctos populos), commanding all peoples of the empire to follow the Nicene faith professed by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria.

The Council of Chalcedon, the fourth ecumenical council, convened from 8 October to 1 November 451 at Chalcedon in Bithynia (modern Kadikoy, Istanbul), summoned by the Eastern Roman emperor Marcian and attended by roughly 520 bishops, the…

Clovis I, king of the Salian Franks, was baptised into Nicene (Catholic) Christianity by Bishop Remigius at Reims, traditionally dated to Christmas Day 496 though some scholars place the event around 508.

According to the Nihon Shoki, in 552 CE King Seong (Seongmyeong) of the Korean kingdom of Baekje sent a diplomatic mission to the Yamato court of Emperor Kinmei bearing a gilt-bronze image of Shakyamuni Buddha, Buddhist sutras, ritual…

Elected bishop of Rome in 590 as plague ravaged the city, Gregory I, later called Gregory the Great, reshaped the western Church and the role of the papacy.

Around the 6th and 7th centuries CE, a powerful new mode of Hindu devotion known as bhakti crystallised in the Tamil country (Tamilakam) of South India, articulated through the ecstatic vernacular hymns of two groups of poet-saints: the…

According to Islamic tradition, around 610 CE the Meccan merchant Muhammad, then about forty, received the first of the revelations that would form the Quran while meditating in the Cave of Hira on Jabal al-Nour near Mecca.

In 622 CE Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to the oasis town of Yathrib, soon renamed Medina, to escape mounting persecution by the Quraysh.

In 635 CE the Syriac monk Alopen, a missionary of the Church of the East (often called Nestorian Christianity), arrived in the Tang capital of Chang'an after travelling the Silk Road from the Sasanian-Persian sphere, marking the first…

On 10 October 680 CE, near Karbala in present-day Iraq, a small band of relatives and supporters of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad, was surrounded and massacred by the far larger army of the Umayyad caliph Yazid I.

Convened by the emperor Constantine IV and meeting from November 680 to September 681, the Third Council of Constantinople is reckoned the Sixth Ecumenical Council by the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

Adi Shankara, a Hindu philosopher and theologian born at Kaladi in Kerala and active in the first half of the eighth century CE, systematised the non-dualist (Advaita) school of Vedanta and reinvigorated orthodox Brahminical thought…

Around 726 the emperor Leo III the Isaurian began to turn imperial policy against the veneration of religious images, and by 730 he had formally prohibited the use of icons, inaugurating the first phase of Byzantine Iconoclasm.

Under the patronage of the Tibetan emperor Trisong Detsen, the Indian Buddhist scholar Shantarakshita and the tantric master Padmasambhava founded Samye, the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, in the Yarlung valley region southeast of…

The Huichang Persecution was a state-directed suppression of Buddhism in Tang China that reached its peak in 845 CE under Emperor Wuzong, named for his Huichang reign era (841-846).

Around 934 CE, Satuq Bughra Khan, a ruler of the Kara-Khanid (Qarakhanid) confederation in Central Asia, embraced Islam and made it the state religion, making the Kara-Khanids the first major Turkic dynasty to convert.

After the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli conquered Egypt and founded the new city of Cairo in 969 for the Ismaili Shi'a caliph al-Mu'izz li-Din Allah, construction of the al-Azhar mosque began in 970 and was completed in 972.

In 1054 the long-building rift between the Latin (Roman) and Greek (Byzantine) churches hardened into formal schism.

King Anawrahta (r. 1044-1077), founder of the Pagan (Bagan) Empire in Upper Burma, made Theravada Buddhism the dominant religion of his realm, beginning the tradition's enduring ascendancy in mainland Southeast Asia.

Toward the end of the eleventh century the ruler of Kanem, Mai Umme Jilmi (also rendered Humai), embraced Islam, replacing the older Duguwa line with the Sayfawa dynasty that would rule Kanem and later Bornu for some eight centuries.

The Investiture Controversy was a decades-long struggle between popes and emperors over who held the right to appoint (invest) bishops and abbots.

During the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the Zagwe king Gebre Mesqel Lalibela commissioned a remarkable complex of monolithic churches cut directly downward into the volcanic rock of the Ethiopian highlands.

Around 1267 the ruler Merah Silu of Samudra Pasai, on the northern coast of Sumatra, converted to Islam and took the name Malik al-Salih, founding what is generally regarded as the first Islamic sultanate in Southeast Asia.

After the papacy returned from Avignon to Rome under Gregory XI in 1377, the disputed election of Urban VI in April 1378 split the Latin Church.

On 3 May 1491, the ManiKongo (king) Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised as João I at Mbanza Kongo, marking the first conversion of a sub-Saharan African monarch to Roman Catholicism.

Around 1499, Guru Nanak (1469-1539), a spiritual teacher from the Punjab region of South Asia, experienced a profound mystical revelation while bathing in the Bein (Vein) river near Sultanpur Lodhi, after which he declared 'There is no…

After capturing Tabriz in 1501, the teenage Safavid leader Ismail I took the title Shah and declared Twelver Shia Islam the official and compulsory faith of his new Iranian state.

On 31 October 1517 the Augustinian friar and theology professor Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses at Wittenberg, attacking the sale of indulgences and questioning papal authority over salvation.

Summoned before the imperial Diet of Worms, convened by Emperor Charles V and held from January to May 1521, Martin Luther was ordered to recant his writings.

In March 1536 the French reformer John Calvin published in Basel the first edition of his Institutio Christianae Religionis, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first systematic theological summary of the reform movement.

The Catholic Church mounted a sustained response to the Reformation through institutional renewal and doctrinal clarification.

In 1564 the Mughal emperor Akbar abolished the jizya, the poll tax traditionally levied on non-Muslim subjects, signalling a deliberate state policy of religious accommodation across his vast and diverse empire.

Beginning at dawn on 24 August 1572 in Paris, Catholic mobs and royal forces slaughtered French Protestants (Huguenots) who had gathered for the wedding of the Protestant Henry of Navarre to Margaret of Valois.

On 13 April 1598 King Henry IV of France issued the Edict of Nantes, granting French Protestants (Huguenots) substantial rights of conscience and worship and bringing the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) to a close.

In 1604, Guru Arjan, the fifth Sikh Guru, completed the compilation of the Adi Granth ("First Book"), the foundational scripture of Sikhism, at Amritsar in the Punjab.

In 1632 Galileo published the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which compared the Ptolemaic and Copernican models and made a powerful case for a moving Earth, despite a 1616 precept warning him not to hold or defend…

In December 1637 an uprising of overtaxed peasants and masterless samurai, many of them Catholic converts, erupted on Japan's Shimabara Peninsula and the nearby Amakusa islands under the youthful leader Amakusa Shiro.

On 18 October 1685 Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, revoking the Edict of Nantes (1598) and stripping France's Protestant Huguenots of the legal toleration they had held for nearly a century.

In 1744 the religious reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud, the emir of the small Najdi oasis town of Diriyah, sealed a mutual-support pact that fused religious authority with political power on the Arabian Peninsula.

In October 1819, only months after the death of Kamehameha I, his son and successor Liholiho (Kamehameha II) publicly dismantled the ancient kapu system in an event known as the ʻAi Noa, or "free eating." Strongly urged by the powerful…

In late February 1848, around the 21st, a slim pamphlet titled the Manifesto of the Communist Party appeared in London, printed in German and commissioned by the Communist League.

The Baha'i Faith emerged as a distinct world religion in 1863 when Baha'u'llah (Mirza Husayn-Ali Nuri, 1817-1892) declared in the Garden of Ridvan near Baghdad that he was the messianic 'He whom God shall make manifest' foretold by the Bab.

On 28 September 1864 delegates meeting at St Martin's Hall in London founded the International Workingmen's Association, later known as the First International.

Beginning in April 1906 in a converted building at 312 Azusa Street in Los Angeles, a series of revival meetings led by the African American preacher William J. Seymour gave organisational and spiritual momentum to modern Pentecostalism.

In 1925 the Soviet Union established the League of Militant Atheists (later the League of the Militant Godless), a mass organisation tasked with propagating state atheism and eradicating religious belief across the USSR.

Around 1926, the Deobandi Islamic scholar Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi launched the Tablighi Jamaat ("Society for Spreading Faith") in the Mewat region of British India, near the Dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin in Delhi.

In March 1928, the schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun) in the Egyptian canal city of Ismailia, together with six workers of the Suez Canal Company.

On 22 August 1948, representatives of 147 churches from 44 countries gathered in Amsterdam to inaugurate the World Council of Churches (WCC), a fellowship of churches affirming Jesus Christ as God and Saviour.

In the autumn of 1949, the young evangelist Billy Graham held a revival campaign in a large tent in downtown Los Angeles that propelled him to national fame and helped define postwar American evangelicalism.

After his release from prison in 1952, Malcolm X met Elijah Muhammad in Chicago and rose rapidly within the Nation of Islam, an African American religious and Black-nationalist movement that blended elements of Islam with calls for racial…

In March 1959 a popular uprising erupted in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, amid fears that Chinese authorities intended to detain the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

The Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII and continued under Pope Paul VI, met in St. Peter's Basilica in four sessions from 11 October 1962 to 8 December 1965.

The Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM II), held at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, applied the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) to Latin American conditions and is widely regarded as the founding moment…

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on 14 February 1989 calling for the death of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book "The Satanic Verses" many Muslims condemned as blasphemous toward the…

The Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya, was torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob on 6 December 1992, unleashing some of independent India's deadliest communal violence.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on 4 November 1995 in Tel Aviv, shot in the back by Yigal Amir, a right-wing Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo peace process.

The Tokyo subway sarin attack of 20 March 1995 was the world's most shocking act of chemical terrorism by a non-state group, carried out by the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo during the morning rush hour.