Part 1. Foundations: Prehistory and the Indo-Iranian World

Every chapter of this study rests on two decisions: which sources to read, and how to read them. The comparative history of religions has argued over both since the nineteenth century. Its founders compared religions across continents in search of…

The religions studied in this book come with texts, but religion is far older than writing. For tens of thousands of years before the Rigveda or the Gathas, people buried their dead, painted caves, carved figurines and raised monuments of…

Long before the Indo-Iranian tribes reached the plateau (see ch. 6), the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates had a religion of cities, temples and written theology. Its first evidence comes with writing, around 3500 BC. It ended only…

Mesopotamia (ch. 3) gave the ancient world a pessimistic picture of the dead and kings who ruled as servants of the gods. Egypt gave it the reverse: a king who was himself divine, a cosmic order the king had to…

The narrow strip of land between the Mediterranean and the Syrian desert produced the gods with whom the Hebrew Bible argues most bitterly: Baal, Asherah, Molech and the “host of heaven”. For most of the modern era these gods were…

The religions this study follows, from the Gathas and Roman Mithraism to the dualist currents that reached Judaism, Christianity, Islam and later esoteric movements, have one of their deepest roots in a religion that left no scripture of its own.…

Chapter 6 reconstructed the shared Indo-Iranian religion from what the Rigveda and the Avesta hold in common. This chapter looks at the Indian branch. The Rigveda is the oldest surviving witness to the gods whom Zarathushtra’s tradition would partly exalt…

Chapter 6 described the pressing of haoma/soma as the central Indo-Iranian rite and noted that Zarathushtra seems to have condemned it (see ch. 6). This chapter takes up two questions left open there. The first is what the drink was.…