What was the first religion ever established and recorded in history?
1. When was the first religion established? No body knows. Homo Sap goes back over 100,000 years and there were early varieties before that. As a practical matter early hominids probably tried to explain the unexplainable by imagining invisible oogly booglies (or ascribing special powers to visible objects) and attempted to placate them with rituals and sacrifices. Archaeological digs indicate rituals (like burials) by Neanderthals that may have had a religious component. Evidence of ritual behavior in Africa has been found as far back as 70,000 years. Cave paintings that go back 20 to 50 thousand years look very much like some sort of attempt to manipulate supernatural forces. 2. When was the first religion recorded? That’s somewhat easier as recorded history only goes back 6,000 years or so. The earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia, and the Indus and Nile valleys all had formal worship of some sort of supernatural critters as integral parts of their cultures. These, no doubt, had mu
Difficult because their was religion thousands of years before people began writing. Religion has always been part of society. I do not know of any civilizations or societies that existed without religion. Communist countries have tried, but people held to the old ways & worshipped in secret. The first religion involved the Mother Earth Goddess or the Venus Figurines, associated with prehistoric cultures. This was a female form, usually the torso, with large or even multiple breasts & enlarged (pregnant) stomach. They later refined the image to include an actual human-like form; head & legs. The breasts & pregnant stomach were still a requirement. The initial ones were carved from wood & they progressed to those shaped from stone. Recorded history begins with the invention of writing. Any time before that is classified as pre-historic. People started writing about 5500 years ago or 3500 BC. The Mesopotamians & Ancient Egyptians were the first known to have written. The Ancient Minoans
For something to be “recorded in history,” it needs to be written down. History is the period that occurs after the invention of writing, anything before that is “prehistoric.” So, who invented writing? Sumerians, in modern-day Iraq. Their writing involved making impressions in clay with a wedge-shaped stylus, called “cuneiform.” Writing changed the world. Their religion is the first one in history because they were the first to put stylus to clay and “record” it. (Of course, there was religion long before Sumer.) What was Sumerian religion like? It was pretty developed. They had temples and offerings – we know this from their leftover receipts and documents:
