What happened to religion when the first states and cities appeared? From about 3500 BC, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus valley and later the Americas, religion became public, professional and political. Gods owned cities, kings ruled as gods or on their behalf, priests kept the first archives, and in several societies rulers killed people as offerings. This post surveys the evidence for ancient religion in the first civilisations, flags where interpretation outruns it, and reads the pattern through historical, scientific and theological lenses.
Part 3 of How did religion develop?. Previous: The first signs of religion. Next: The Axial Age and the one God.
A note on sources. Much of this period is covered by standard scholarly monographs that the notes cite from their bibliographic records without opening them. Those are marked "(bibliographic)", and the post describes their arguments without quoting them or resting figures on them.
Mesopotamia: the god's house and the first writing
In southern Mesopotamia the state grew up around the temple. The earliest proto-cuneiform tablets come from the Eanna precinct at Uruk, about 3400–3200 BC, and most of them are bookkeeping for large institutional households: rations, livestock, labour and land (Nissen, Damerow & Englund 1993, bibliographic). Writing, on this evidence, was invented largely to manage the gods' estates. An older model in which the temple owned all the land has been abandoned: the temple was one great household among several (Foster 1981, bibliographic).
Each city had a patron god who owned it: Enlil at Nippur, Nanna at Ur, and later Marduk at Babylon. A city's fortunes were described as its god's (Jacobsen 1976, bibliographic). Kingship was presented as a gift from heaven, but only a few kings, such as Naram-Sin of Akkad and Shulgi of Ur, were deified. Most were the god's stewards (Brisch 2008, bibliographic). The Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, in which Marduk defeats Tiamat and is acclaimed king of the gods, is widely read as political theology for Babylon's rise (Lambert 2013, bibliographic).
The flood story in Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, borrowed from the older Atrahasis, parallels Genesis 6–9 closely: a divine decision to destroy humanity, a warned hero, a boat sealed with pitch, birds sent out, a mountain landing and a sacrifice (George 2003; Lambert & Millard 1969, both bibliographic). Almost all scholars posit literary dependence or a shared tradition. Direction and mechanism are still debated. Many also read Genesis as a deliberate monotheistic reworking, in which one God acts for moral reasons in place of gods irritated by human noise (Frymer-Kensky 1977, bibliographic).
Thorkild Jacobsen proposed that Mesopotamians imagined the divine first as powers inside nature, then as rulers, then as personal parents. Critics call the scheme too neat. It is a model, not data (Jacobsen 1976; Bottéro 2001, both bibliographic).
At the Royal Cemetery of Ur, about 2600–2450 BC, "death pits" held dozens of attendants, 74 in the largest. CT scans of two skulls found injuries at or near the time of death, and the bodies had been treated and laid out in rows. That contradicts the old idea of a peaceful poison cup (Baadsgaard et al. 2011). Mesopotamian sacrifice of this kind was episodic and tied to royal funerals.
Egypt: the king, ma'at and the afterlife
Pharaonic kingship treated the living king as Horus and the dead king as Osiris. Most Egyptologists now think the office was divine while the person was human (Frankfort 1948; Posener 1960, both bibliographic). The king's task was to uphold ma'at, a goddess and a principle of cosmic, social and moral order (Assmann 1990, bibliographic). The afterlife texts began as a royal preserve in the Pyramid Texts, about 2350 BC, and later appeared on non-royal coffins and papyri. Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead weighs the heart against ma'at. Whether this was a democratisation of the afterlife or a late textual trace of older hopes is disputed (Smith 2017, bibliographic). The First Dynasty royal tombs at Abydos are ringed by subsidiary graves, about 200 around the tomb of Djer by one overview, and many scholars read them as retainers killed at the king's burial. Direct evidence for the cause of death is limited, and the practice disappears after the First Dynasty (ANE Today).
Akhenaten (about 1353–1336 BC) promoted the sun disc, the Aten, as sole god, closed access to it except through the royal family, and had the name of Amun hacked out. The reform collapsed after his death. Whether it was true monotheism, a royal monolatry or something else is still argued (Hornung 1999; Redford 1984, both bibliographic). Jan Assmann proposed that Akhenaten and the remembered figure of Moses introduced something new, which he calls the Mosaic distinction between true and false religion, which replaced a world in which gods could be translated across cultures. Assmann frames this as a history of memory, not a claim of historical dependence. Critics, including theologians, charged that it tied monotheism to intolerance, and he later qualified it (Assmann 1997, 2010, bibliographic).
China: oracle bones and the Mandate of Heaven
The late Shang state at Anyang (about 1250–1046 BC) was governed partly through divination. Heat was applied to turtle shells and cattle shoulder blades, the cracks were read, and the questions were often carved on them. These are the earliest Chinese writing (Keightley 1978, bibliographic). Royal ancestors received a scheduled cycle of sacrifices. Above them was a high god, Di, though some scholars argue "Di" was a collective term for ancestral powers (Eno 2009, bibliographic).
The sacrifices included people. Christina Cheung estimates that more than 13,000 people were sacrificed at Yinxu over about 200 years, often 50 at a time, and that more than 2,500 sacrificial pits lie in the royal cemetery area (Sapiens). That is an extrapolated estimate. An isotope study of 68 victims found non-local diets early in life and local diets in the years before death, which suggests captives were held for years before being killed (Cheung et al. 2017).
The Zhou, who conquered the Shang about 1046 BC, justified their rule by the Mandate of Heaven: Heaven withdrew its favour from the Shang for drunkenness and cruelty and gave it to the virtuous Zhou kings (Shaughnessy 1999, bibliographic). Divine favour became conditional on moral conduct. Mass human sacrifice largely ended under the Zhou, though not entirely. Michael Puett cautions against a tidy story of magical Shang and ethical Zhou (Puett 2002, bibliographic).
The Indus and Vedic India
The Indus civilisation (mature phase about 2600–1900 BC) is the cautionary case. Its script is undeciphered, and some argue it is not a full writing system at all (Farmer, Sproat & Witzel 2004; Rao et al. 2009, both bibliographic). There are no unambiguous temples or palaces. John Marshall's 1931 reading of a seal figure as a "proto-Shiva" was widely accepted for two generations and is no longer a consensus. Competing readings include a female figure, a buffalo-man and others (Pashupati seal summary). Claims that Shiva worship is 5,000 years old run ahead of the evidence. The honest statement is that we do not know what Indus religion was.
Vedic religion is known from the Rigveda, orally composed probably about 1500–1200 BC (Jamison & Brereton 2014, bibliographic). It centres on fire sacrifice (yajña) to gods such as Agni and Indra, performed by hereditary priests, and on the ritual drink soma, whose botanical identity is unknown.
The Americas: independent invention
The New World matters because it had no contact with the Old. At Tenochtitlan, the Aztec skull tower known as the Huei Tzompantli has yielded more than 600 skulls since excavation began in 2015, from men, women and at least three children. That overturns the assumption that the victims were all warrior men (Smithsonian 2020). The archaeologist Raúl Barrera Rodríguez said the dead were "turned into gifts for the gods". The bioarchaeology confirms sacrifice on a large scale, but not the largest figures from Spanish chronicles, which most scholars consider inflated. In the Andes, hair analysis of Inca children sacrificed on the 6,739-metre volcano Llullaillaco shows coca and alcohol intake escalating in the year before death (Wilson et al. 2013). The authors raise, without settling, questions of consent, coercion and compliance. These cases are typologically archaic states, not contemporary with the others: they date to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD.
Did sacrifice build hierarchy?
Watts and colleagues (2016) tested the "social control" idea with 93 Austronesian societies. Forty practised ritual human sacrifice: 67% of highly stratified societies, 37% of moderately stratified ones and 25% of egalitarian ones. Victims were usually low-status and sacrificers high-status (MPI press release). The phylogenetic models suggested sacrifice helped societies gain high stratification and keep it (Watts et al. 2016). A statistician's blog critique noted that the key Bayes factor, 3.78, is not overwhelming (Robert 2016), and the study covers one language family. The notes found no formal published reply.
Through the lenses
Historical criticism and history of religions
Trigger's comparison of seven early civilisations concluded that none separated religion from rule, and that the ruler as chief mediator with the supernatural was universal (Trigger 2003, bibliographic). A defensible summary: the first states turned gods into city-owners and king-makers, made ritual into administration, and made sacrifice a display of power over life. The Mesopotamian evidence suggests religion organised the state materially, through temple households, before it did so ideologically.
Archaeology and bioarchaeology
The physical record is strongest on scale: tablets, pits, skulls and isotopes. It is weakest on inner belief, above all in the Indus and among the Olmec. A fair account of sacrifice avoids both denial and sensationalism. The Aztec bones refute the claim that sacrifice was a Spanish invention, and they do not support the largest chronicle numbers.
Cognitive and evolutionary science
These states fit what Harvey Whitehouse calls the doctrinal mode of religion: frequent, routinised ritual, specialist priesthoods and canonical texts, able to bind large anonymous populations (Whitehouse 2004, bibliographic). Their high gods were not clearly moralising in the later sense, with partial exceptions in Egyptian ma'at and the Zhou Heaven. Part 5 takes up the quantitative test of that sequence, and its retraction.
Catholic theology
A Catholic reading has two resources here. Genesis, read alongside Atrahasis, can be taken as a deliberate correction of the surrounding myths, in which one good God judges for moral reasons. The notes observe that this confessional reading and the critical reading of literary borrowing are not mutually exclusive. And the Catechism, while recognising a universal search for God, adds that "in their religious behavior, however, men also display the limits and errors that disfigure the image of God in them" (CCC §844). Applying that to Ur, the Shang pits or the Aztec tzompantli is an interpretation, but it is consistent with the text. Where the lens strains: it offers a moral judgement on archaic religion, not an explanation of why sacrifice tracked hierarchy so closely. For that, it needs the social sciences.
Orthodox and patristic theology
The Fathers shared by both Churches had a sharper vocabulary. Justin Martyr praised "the seed of reason [the Logos] implanted in every race of men" (2 Apology 8), and in the same work blamed devils for turning people against those who lived by reason. The notes add that he ascribed pagan rites to demonic imitation, a half of his account that modern irenic readings often drop. Read that way, the first states show both halves: a real reaching for order and justice (ma'at, the Mandate of Heaven) and cults of blood. A historian will treat "demons" as a theological category outside the evidence. What the patristic frame shares with the historian is a refusal to romanticise archaic religion.
What we can say with confidence
- In independent civilisations, state formation came with priesthoods, temple institutions, sacred kingship and state-run divination.
- Human sacrifice is securely attested at Ur, Abydos, Shang Anyang, Tenochtitlan and among the Inca. It often declined as bureaucratic states matured.
- Writing in Mesopotamia and China arose largely in temple administration and royal divination.
- The Zhou Mandate of Heaven made divine favour conditional on the ruler's conduct.
What remains open
- What Indus religion was.
- Whether Akhenaten's reform counts as monotheism, and whether it had any link to Israel. Assmann himself does not claim one.
- Whether sacrifice caused stratification or elites used whatever violent ritual was to hand.
- How Genesis relates to Mesopotamian flood traditions, in direction and mechanism.
Sources
- ANE Today. Human sacrifice in the ancient Near East and Egypt. Link
- Assmann, J. (1990). Ma'at; (1997) Moses the Egyptian; (2010) The Price of Monotheism (bibliographic).
- Baadsgaard, A. et al. (2011). Antiquity 85(327):27–42. Cambridge Core
- Bottéro, J. (2001). Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (bibliographic).
- Brisch, N. (ed.) (2008). Religion and Power. ISAC (bibliographic)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church §844. vatican.va
- Cheung, C. et al. (2017). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 48:28–45. DOI
- Cheung, C., on Yinxu sacrifice. Sapiens
- Eno, R. (2009). In Early Chinese Religion, Brill (bibliographic).
- Farmer, S., Sproat, R. & Witzel, M. (2004) and Rao, R. P. N. et al. (2009) on the Indus script (bibliographic).
- Foster, B. R. (1981). JESHO 24(3) (bibliographic).
- Frankfort, H. (1948). Kingship and the Gods (bibliographic).
- Frymer-Kensky, T. (1977). Biblical Archaeologist 40(4) (bibliographic).
- George, A. R. (2003). The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic; Lambert, W. G. & Millard, A. R. (1969). Atra-hasis (bibliographic).
- Hornung, E. (1999). Akhenaten and the Religion of Light; Redford, D. B. (1984). Akhenaten (bibliographic).
- Jacobsen, T. (1976). The Treasures of Darkness (bibliographic).
- Jamison, S. W. & Brereton, J. P. (2014). The Rigveda (bibliographic).
- Justin Martyr, Second Apology. newadvent.org
- Keightley, D. N. (1978). Sources of Shang History (bibliographic).
- Lambert, W. G. (2013). Babylonian Creation Myths (bibliographic).
- Nissen, H. J., Damerow, P. & Englund, R. K. (1993). Archaic Bookkeeping (bibliographic).
- Pashupati seal, summary of the scholarship. Wikipedia
- Posener, G. (1960). De la divinité du Pharaon (bibliographic).
- Puett, M. J. (2002). To Become a God (bibliographic).
- Robert, C. P. (2016). Reversible chainsaw massacre. R-bloggers
- Shaughnessy, E. L. (1999). Western Zhou History. Cambridge History of Ancient China (bibliographic).
- Smith, M. (2017). Following Osiris (bibliographic).
- Smithsonian Magazine (2020). Skulls in Aztec tower over 600. Link
- Trigger, B. G. (2003). Understanding Early Civilizations (bibliographic).
- Watts, J. et al. (2016). Nature 532:228–231. DOI; MPI press release
- Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of Religiosity (bibliographic).
- Wilson, A. S. et al. (2013). PNAS 110(33):13322–13327. DOI
The notes behind this post: 03_early_states.md.
Part 3 of How did religion develop?. Previous: The first signs of religion. Next: The Axial Age and the one God: how monotheism emerged in ancient Israel.
Produced with AI assistance (Claude) from the cited notes in the religion-origins project.