ANCIENT WISDOM: Words of Faith

In our first installment of ANCIENT WISDOM, A Series of Exploration into Ancient Faiths – The Beginning we observed that the ancient hunter/gatherers cultivated community cooperation and ultimately observed that some things were more “powerful” than other things.  This led to the cultivation a three-tiered hierarchy:  human level (souls at a “human level” of power), supra-human level (souls more powerful than the human) and sub-human level (souls less powerful than humans).

We also observed that, as the ice of the ice age receded and sustained agriculture arose among humanity, human culture transitioned away from a predominantly hunter/gatherer lifestyle, slowly transitioning from a nomadic hunting lifestyle and into a more settled agrarian lifestyle.  They slowly developed communities of humans often settling around rivers and other water sources.  Eventually accumulating groups of humans who were not of the same family came to live together in such communities.  

As the oral traditions of the hunter/gatherers came to be passed down into settled communities new traditions became added to the ancient oral traditions.  But it is clear that oral religious traditions of various faiths predate written systems. Some examples include:

•  The Hebrew oral traditions of the Torah date back to c. 3775 BC, and some of its written elements are thought to have existed about 1500 to 1250 BC. 

• The oldest known Mound Builder society in the North Americas dates to c. 3500 BC. 

• The monotheistic god Aten, made famous by Akhenaten (King Tut’s father), is first mentioned during the period of 1991 to 1802 BC.

• The Vedas and Vedic religion have existed since around the same time frame, c. 1700-1500 BC when the Indo-Aryan peoples in the northwestern Indian subcontinent arrived in the Indus Valley.  This faith system holds the distinction of being the earliest written record of a faith system c. 975 BC.

• It is likely that the Druid traditions extend back to about 1000 BC as well.  

It is safe to say that at the time that the “urban development” of humanity began about 4000 BC it becomes evident that some form of “rules for civilization” were developed. 

The first written law dates to between 2100 and 2050 BC.  It is likely that the oral traditions were incorporated into the written traditions of a civilization, the earliest of which originated c. 975 BC.  

From the first written laws and settlements ultimately comes the concepts of citizenship – the legal status of being a member of a state or nation, which includes both rights and responsibilities.

One view is that the beginning of citizenship dates back to the ancient Israelites. These people developed an understanding of themselves as a distinct and unique people—different from the Egyptians or Babylonians. They had a one-deity-only religion sometimes described as ethical monotheism. While most peoples developed a loose identity tied to a specific geographic location, the Jewish people kept their common identity despite being physically moved to different lands.

The Jewish Covenant has been described as a binding agreement not just with a few people or tribal leaders, but between the whole nation of Israel, including men, women and children, with their Jewish deity.

There is more widespread agreement that the first real instances of citizenship began in ancient Greece emerging in a readily discernible form in the Greek city-states which began to dot the shores around the Mediterranean perhaps around the 8th century BC.

To the ancients, citizenship was a bond between a person and the city-state. Before Greek times, a person was generally connected to a tribe or kin-group such as an extended family, but citizenship added a layer to these ties—a non-kinship bond between the person and the state.

An important aspect of polis citizenship was exclusivity. Polis meant both the political assembly as well as the entire society. Citizens had a higher status than non-citizens. The first form of citizenship was based on the way people lived in the Ancient Greek times, in small-scale organic communities of the polis. Citizenship was not seen as a separate activity from the private life of the individual person, in the sense that there was not a distinction between public and private life. The obligations of citizenship were deeply connected into one's everyday life in the polis.

Previously:  The Beginnings

Next: The Writings of Faith. (when published)