Ancient and Indigenous Religions

This area surveys the earliest documented and reconstructible religious traditions, from prehistoric and archaic religion through the literate cultures of the ancient Near East to the religious systems of indigenous and oral societies.

Definition

The study of the religions of prehistoric, ancient, and indigenous societies, reconstructed from archaeological, textual, and ethnographic evidence.

Scope

It covers prehistoric and archaic religion inferred from archaeology, the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt known from texts and monuments, the diverse traditions of indigenous and oral cultures, and recurring forms such as shamanism and animism. The treatment is historical and comparative, describing beliefs, rituals, and institutions and the scholarly debates about them without asserting the truth of any tradition.

Sub-topics

• Indigenous and Oral Religious Traditions
• Mesopotamian and Egyptian Religion
• Prehistoric and Archaic Religion
• Shamanism and Animism

Core questions

• What can material remains tell us about prehistoric religion?
• How were the religions of Mesopotamia and Egypt organized around gods, kingship, and cult?
• What characterizes the religions of indigenous and oral societies?
• Are categories such as shamanism and animism useful cross-cultural descriptions?

Key theories

Morphology of the sacred in early religion

Eliade's treatment of early religions as expressing recurrent structures of the sacred—cosmogony, sacred space and time, and the symbolism of the centre—reconstructed across the Stone Age and ancient civilizations.

Polytheism as a coherent religious logic

Studies of Mesopotamian and Egyptian religion, such as Bottéro's and Hornung's, that interpret ancient polytheism as a structured system relating many gods, cosmic order, and the state rather than as primitive confusion.

History

Scholarly understanding of ancient religion was transformed by the decipherment of cuneiform and hieroglyphs in the nineteenth century and by twentieth-century archaeology and anthropology, while evolutionary schemes that ranked indigenous traditions as 'primitive' have been largely abandoned in favour of contextual, non-hierarchical study.

Debates

Reconstructing prehistoric belief from material remains

Because prehistoric peoples left no texts, scholars dispute how far burials, figurines, and cave art license inferences about specific beliefs rather than reflecting modern projection.

Key figures

• Mircea Eliade
• Jean Bottéro
• Erik Hornung
• Edward Burnett Tylor

Seminal works

• eliade1976vol1
• bottero2001
• hornung1982

Frequently asked questions

Why are indigenous religions studied alongside ancient ones?

They are grouped for convenience as traditions often known partly through non-textual evidence; the grouping is not a claim that indigenous religions are 'older' or less developed than others.

How do we know anything about prehistoric religion?

Inferences rest on archaeological evidence such as burials, art, and figurines, interpreted cautiously and often by analogy, since no written sources survive.