Spreading eastwards
Much more widespread throughout the world is Buddhism. It was also a reaction to orthodox Brahmanism and was founded by Siddhartha Gautama in North East India in the 5th century BC. Buddhists aim to reach a state of enlightenment by focusing on spiritual development.
Confucianism developed in the 5th and 6th centuries BC in China. Based on the teachings of Confucius (the Latin version of K'ung Fu-tzu – Kong the Master) (551-479BC), it emphasised love for fellow people with duty to parents in a rigidly hierarchical society. Confucian teachings were revitalised with the publication of four great texts in the 12th century AD.
Middle Eastern peoples
Ancient Egyptian carvings
The ancient Egyptians believed that the souls of the dead would return to their bodies so they mummified their remains and built them elaborate tombs. Egyptian and Babylonian religions started as fertility cults. The Earth was female and the sun was male. It was common to worship bulls, which embodied male fertility. The Greek myths, performed on public festivals, grew out of these fertility beliefs. For the Greeks, the Captain of the Gods was Zeus; for the Romans it was Jupiter. The God of love or beauty was Aphrodite or Venus. Much of the philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome would inform Judaism and Christianity.
One god
In about 2000BC in the Middle East, the monotheist faith, Judaism, was developing, According to the Old Testament, in the 13th century BC the Hebrews (not yet Jews) were rescued from slavery in Egypt by Moses, who was given the Ten Commandments, the basic ethical and religious precepts of Judaism. After the second temple was destroyed in 70AD, the Jewish people migrated all over the world. Zionism, a movement for the establishment of a Jewish state, started to grow in the 19th century and, after the genocide of the European Jews in the Nazi Holocaust the United Nations voted for the establishment of a Jewish state of Israel in Palestine. Most Jews today still choose to stay in the diaspora.
Road to Damascus
Christianity was making its appearance in the Middle East around 2,000 years ago. Initially it was a strand of Judaism until St Barnabas and St Paul declared that Judaism's rites were unnecessary. Christianity was a minority interest persecuted by the Roman Empire until the Christian Roman emperor Constantine in 312. Over the coming centuries it spread and as it grew it adapted and split into many different churches.
