Year
Paleolithic					Concept of the Great Mother; known as Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece. Metaphorical attempts to describe a reality too complex and elusive to express in any other way.
4000 BCE					Sumerians in Tigris-Euphrates valley (modern day Iraq) establish one of the first great cultures ofthe civilised world.   Cuneiform script, impressive architecture, literature and mythology.
					Conquered by Semitic Akkadians.
2000 BCE					Amorites conquer Sumerian-Akkadian civilisation.  Capital: Babylon
1700 BCE	India		Aryans from what is now Iran invade the Indus valley and subdue the indigenous population.  They imposed their religious ideas, expressed ni the collection of odes known as the Rig-Veda.	The same multiplicity of gods can be found here as in the old testament.  They presented the forces of nature imbued with power, life and personality.  Nevertheless, there are signs that the people of this time were beginning to see that all these various gods might be simply manifestations of one divine Absolute that transcended them all.	Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were well aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality bu expressed a mystery which perhaps even the gods could not adequately explain.
1850 BCE			First Hebrew settlement in Canaan (modern Israel); associated with Abraham and Hebron. Abraham would certainly have believed in the existence of such deities as Marduk, Baal and Anat. The God of Abraham was probably El, the high god of Canaan.  The deity introduces himself to Abraham as El Shaddai (El of the mountain).   Genesis 17:1	Notice that the God of Abraham is a personable deity who becomes a friend, or takes the form of a human being.  This kind of divine apparition is known as an epiphany, and is very common in the pagan writings of antiquity, such as the Iliad.	The epiphany stories express well the pagan belief that gods and men were not essentially distinct: their meetings could therefore be revealed without great fanfare. It was common even to believe that such meetings could occur in the lives of everyday people: which may explain why as late as the 1st century AD, the apostle Paul and his disciple Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes by the people of Lystra in what is now Turkey. Acts of the Apostles 14:11-18
1700 BCE				Enuma Elish	New Year festival established: ritual encapsulates belief that political stability can only endure in so far as it resembled the government and law of the gods.  Babylon immerses itself in the mana (sacred power) on which they felt their own existence depended. Belief in the original creation of pairs of gods from a divine, formless, watery substance, which had existed for all eternity.   New gods emerged in successive pairs, gradually assuming greater definition. Apsu and Tiamat (abyss and void) Lahmu and Lahamn (water and earth) Ansher and Kishar (sky and sea) Anu and Ea (heavens and earth) Marduk and Tiamat The creation of Babylon is enshrined in the mythic battle between the generations of gods, resulting eventually in the creation of the city.   The Babylonians were well aware that their own ancestors had built the city, but the story of Enuma Elish articulated their belieft that their creative enterprise could only endure if it partook of the power of the divine. The idea of a Holy City: one in which people could feel close to the divine powers, remained important in all the majjor religions which followed. The final creative act was that of mankind, from one of the less intelligent of the gods: this is important in that it shows man as related to the gods, no matter how distantly.  This showed that divinity ws not essentially different than humanity: both gods and man shared the same predicament, the only difference being that the gods were more powerful and were immortal.
1500 BCE					Assyrians settle in nearby Ashur
1200 BCE			Third wave of Hebrew settlement : tribes claiming to be descendants of Abraham arrive in Canaan from Egypt: claim to have been liberated from slavery by a god called Yahweh, the god of the leader, Moses	The covenant between Moses and God is said to have taken place on Mount Sinai.  Some scholars think that the covenant did not become important until the 7th century BCE.	The significance of this event is that the Israelites did not believe, up to that time, in a single god: rather, they promised, in the covenant, that they would ignore all other deities and worship him alone. In fact it is very difficult to find a single monotheistic (believing in one god) statement in the whole of the Pentateuch.  Even the Ten Commandments take the existence of other gods for granted: "There shall be no strange gods for you before my face." Exodus 20:2
800 BCE			Biblical account of Exodus written down.  Probably the two earliest Biblical authors, whose work is found in Genesis and Exodus, probably written now.  One writer (J: in the southern kingdom of Judah) calls his god Yahweh; the other, (E: in the northern Kingdom of Israel.) calls his god Elohim.	J begins his account of the creation of the world which, compared with the Enuma Elish, is startligly perfunctory: At a time when Yahweh God made earth and heaven, there was as yet no wild bush on the earth nor had any wild plant sprung up, for Yahweh God had not sent rain on the earth nor was there any man to till the soil.  Yahweh God fashioned man (adam) of dust from the soil (adameh).  Then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and thus man became a living being.  Genesis 2:5-7.	Assyrians conquer Babylon.  The Babylonians attributed their cultural achievements to the gods
800 BCE	India		Changes in the economic and social conditions made the old Vedic religion irrelevant.  The dieas of the indigenous population, suppressed during the Aryna takeover, began to resurface: interest in karma made people unwilling to blame the gods for the irresponsible behaviour of human beings.	This is a major change in the way the unseen forces of nature are viewed.  The ever-present, sometimes oppressivle behaviour of capricous and prejudiced gods is no longer a vital part of either their day to day thinking or forms part of their religious mythology.	The gods were no longer very important in India; they gave way to the religious teacher, who would in some cases be considered higher than the gods.  This is a remarkable assetion of the value of humanity and the dsire to take control of destiny: it would be the great religious insight of the subcontinent. The new religions of Hindusim or Buddhism did not deny the existence of gods or forbid their worship: in their view, such repression would be damaging.  Instead, they sought new ways to go beyond them.  During this century sages began to address these issues in the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, known collectively as the Vedanta: the end of the Vedas.
600 BCE			Greece	Pindar	Pindar expresses a similar belief, that man is related to the gods. Single is the race, single Of men and gods; From a single mother we both draw breath But a difference of power in everything Keeps us apart; For one is as nothing, but the brazen sky Stays a fixed habituation for ever. Yet we can in greatness of mind Or of body be like the Immortals.
600 BCE			The writings of Biblical writer (P) suggest that Israelites had never heard of Yahweh until he appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush.   P makes Yahweh explain that he really was the same God as the God of Abraham, as though this were a rather controversial notion: he tells Moses that Abraham had called him 'El Shaddai' and di not know the divine name Yahweh. Genesis 4:26; Exodus 6:3	It is worth noting that Jacob, in a dream, sees El, who promises that he will keep Jacob safe wherever he goes.  This is a distinct change from the usual pagan deities who were very territorial: it was always prudent to worship the local gods when travelling abroad.  This is one of the first sings that one god is taking on a more universal implication.	It is clear that the god of these times, who encouraged Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, the god of the Exodus, was a despotic and capricous sadist: ready and able to slaughted the first born of an entire nation to preserve one section of society, the "chosen" people. There is little attempt at realism in these stories: the purpose was to bring out the significance of the actual events.  The embellishments serve as a reinforcement of the link between the event in the profane world of time, and of destiny's eternal schedule.
538 BCE	Buddhism		The idea of personal transcendence was embodied in the Yogi, who would leave his family and abandon all social ties and repsonsibilities to seek enlightenment, putting himself in another realm of being.	Around this time, a young warrior named Siddhartha Gautama also left his beautiful wife and young son, his palace home in Kapilavashtu, about 100 miles north of Benares, to become a mendicant ascetic. The trigger for this was said to be his first sight of an old man by the side of the road, whereupon it occurred to him that all human life, no matter how privileged, eventually came to an end, sometimes bringing with it a train of almost unbearable suffering, made all the worse should the life have been full of purely earthly delights.
500 BCE			The final text of Exodus, edited in the 5th century BCE depicts how God is supposed to have made a covenant with Moses on Mount Sinai (an event which is supposed to have happened around 1200 BCE)	The Israelites were very reluctant to pass up the chance to worship other gods, since it seemed foolish to ignore other potential sources of mana  (the life force).	This step towards monotheism would have been unprecedented: the Egyptian pharoah Akenaton had attempted to worship the Sun God to the exclusion of all other traditional deities of Egypt, but his policies were immediately reversed by his successor.
200 BCE	India		About 200 Upanishads created up to this point. The Vedic religion had concerned itself with a holy power in sacrificial ritual: this power was known as Brahman.  The priestly caste were said to possess this power.  Since the ritual sacrifice was seen as the microcosm of the whole universe, Brahman gradually came to mean a power which sustains everything. The whole world was seen as the divine activity welling up from the mysterious being of Brahman, which was the inner meaning of all existence.	The Upanishads encouraged people to cultivate a sense of Brahman in all things.  It was a process of revelation in that it revealed the hidden substance behind the material world. Everything that happens became a manifestation of Brahman: true insight lay in the perception of unity behind the different phenomena.	Brahman is a neutral term: neither he nor she; it does not speak to mankind, or respond in a personal way: sin does not "offend" it and t cannot be said to "love" us or be "angry".  Thanking or praising it for creating the world would be entirely inappropriate. This divine power would be completely alien except that it also sustains, inspires and pervades us.   The techniques of yoga had made people aware of an inner world.  The disciplines of posture, breathing, diet and mental concentration have also been developed in other cultures and seem to produce an experience of enlightenment and illumination which have been interpreted differently but which seem natgural to humanity. The Upanishads claimed that this experience of a new dimension of self was the same holy power which sustained the rest of the world. The eternal spark in each individual was named Atman.