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Burial rituals incorporating grave goods may have been invented by the anatomically modern hominids who emigrated from Africa to the Middle East roughly 100,000 years ago Matt Rossano suggests that the period between 80,000 and 60,000 years before present, following the retreat of humans from the Levant to Africa, was a crucial period in the ...
The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship". The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829. Starting about 1920, "cult" acquired an additional six or more positive and negative definitions.
This roughly coincides with the appearance of Homo sapiens in Europe and decline of the Neanderthals; [3] individual skulls and/or long bones began appearing, heavily stained with red ochre and separately buried. This practice may be the origin of sacred relics. [3] The oldest discovered "Venus figurines" appeared in graves.
Canaanite religion or Syro-Canaanite religions refers to the myths, cults and ritual practices of people in the Levant during roughly the first three millennia BCE. [1] Canaanite religions were polytheistic and in some cases monolatristic. They were influenced by neighboring cultures, particularly ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian religious ...
Throughout all periods of Babylonian-Assyrian history, the conception prevailed of a large dark cavern below the earth, not far from the Apsu—the fresh water abyss encircling and flowing underneath the earth—in which all the dead were gathered and where they led a miserable existence of inactivity, amid gloom and dust. Occasionally a ...
[4] [5] Sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written. [6] [7] The word religion as used in the 21st century does not have an obvious pre-colonial translation into non-European ...
Its role was solidified by a confrontation with the Christian king Abraha, who controlled much of Arabia from a seat of power in Yemen in the middle of the sixth century. [120] Abraha had recently constructed a splendid church in Sana'a , and he wanted to make that city a major center of pilgrimage, but Mecca's Kaaba presented a challenge to ...
In the 1970s, with the rise of secular anti-cult movements, scholars (though not the general public) began to abandon the use of the term cult, regarding it as pejorative. By the end of the 1970s, the term cult was largely replaced in academia with the term "new religion" or " new religious movement ".