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Polytheism is the belief in or worship of more than one god. [1] [2] [3] According to Oxford Reference, it is not easy to count gods, and so not always obvious whether an apparently polytheistic religion, such as Chinese Folk Religions, is really so, or whether the apparent different objects of worship are to be thought of as manifestations of a singular divinity. [1]
1300 BCE – 1046 BCE: The polytheistic religion of the Chinese Shang dynasty reached its mature form. 1300 BCE – 1000 BCE: The "standard" Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh was edited by Sîn-lēqi-unninni. [26] 1200 BCE: The Greek Dark Age began. [27] 1200 BCE: The Olmecs built the earliest pyramids and temples in Central America. [28]
The religion declined following the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC and Egyptians began converting to Christianity. In addition practices such as mummification halted. The Ancient Egyptian religion was considered to have fully died in the 530s. Following the Arab conquest of Egypt under Amr ibn al-As, Egyptians started to convert to Islam.
It is generally agreed that Sumerian civilization began at some point between c. 4500 and 4000 BC, but the earliest historical records only date to around 2900 BC. [24] The Sumerians originally practiced a polytheistic religion, with anthropomorphic deities representing cosmic and terrestrial forces in their world.
[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 ...
Organized religion traces its roots to the Neolithic Revolution that began 11,000 years ago in the Near East, but may have occurred independently in several other locations around the world. The invention of agriculture transformed many human societies from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle .
Punic religion in the western Mediterranean was a direct continuation of the Phoenician variety of the polytheistic ancient Canaanite religion. However, significant local differences developed over the centuries following the foundation of Carthage and other Punic communities elsewhere in North Africa , southern Spain, Sardinia , western Sicily ...
As well as polytheism, religions of the ancient world—that is, those in recorded history closest chronologically to prehistoric religion—focused on orthopraxy, or a focus on correct practice and ritual, rather than orthodoxy, or a focus on correct faith and belief. [95]