Early modern humans buried their dead on purpose, sometimes with red ochre and grave goods. They are among the oldest known deliberate burials.
Engraved pieces of ochre and shell beads show that people were making abstract symbols. Symbolic thought is the ground that ritual grows from.
People painted animals, hands and part-human figures deep in caves, often far from daylight. Many scholars link the art to ritual, storytelling or shamanic practice, though no one knows its meaning for sure.
A figure with a lion's head and a human body, carved from mammoth ivory. It is one of the oldest known images of a being that exists only in the imagination.
A man and two children were buried with astonishing wealth. Thousands of mammoth-ivory beads had been sewn onto their clothing, which points to elaborate funeral rites.
The best known of the Ice Age female figurines found across Europe. People debate whether they are fertility charms, goddesses, self-portraits or something else.
People have lived in Arnhem Land for about 65,000 years, and a painted rock that fell from the ceiling of the Nawarla Gabarnmang shelter shows they were painting there some 28,000 years ago. Kakadu holds some 5,000 recorded rock art sites, with paintings made over many thousands of years, of ancestral beings such as the Rainbow Serpent, whose journeys shaped the land. The tradition never ended: in 1963–64 the Badmardi artist Nayombolmi painted the figures of the Anbangbang gallery at Burrungkuy (Nourlangie).
PeopleNayombolmi
Hunter-gatherers raised rings of huge T-shaped pillars carved with foxes, snakes, boars and vultures, before farming or pottery. It changed how archaeologists think about religion and the first villages.
PeopleKlaus Schmidt (excavator, from 1995)
A town of mud-brick houses entered through the roof. People buried their dead beneath the floors and decorated the rooms with bull horns and wall paintings, so daily life and ritual shared the same space.
Early farmers removed the skulls of their dead, modelled faces over them in plaster and set shells in the eye sockets. It is one of the earliest signs of ancestor veneration.
For at least 6,600 years the Gunditjmara have built channels, weirs and dams across the lava flows of Budj Bim to trap and farm kooyang, the short-finned eel, and lived in villages of stone houses beside their wetlands. Gunditjmara tradition holds that Budj Bim is an ancestral being who revealed himself in the landscape when the volcano erupted. In 2019 the landscape became the first Australian site placed on the World Heritage List solely for its Aboriginal cultural values.
Long rows of standing stones and tombs mark the start of Europe's megalithic age. They are among the oldest monumental structures on the continent.
The world's first great city grew around temples to Inanna and An. Its temple households kept accounts on clay tablets, and that bookkeeping grew into cuneiform, one of the world's earliest writing systems.
A great passage tomb built so that the rising sun at midwinter shines down its passage into the inner chamber. It is older than Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza.
It began as a circular ditch and bank, and people later raised huge sarsen stones and smaller bluestones hauled from Wales. The monument frames the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset.
Royal tombs of the Fourth Dynasty, built for the kings Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing.
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were the great cities of the Indus civilisation, whose script has never been read. On Mohenjo-daro's high mound stands the Great Bath, a watertight brick tank generally thought to have served ritual bathing, though how it was used and what beliefs it served are unknown.
Prayers and spells carved on the walls of the king's burial chambers to protect him and secure his life in the hereafter. They are the oldest surviving body of Egyptian religious writing.
The daughter of Sargon of Akkad served as high priestess of the moon god Nanna. Hymns to Inanna are traditionally credited to her, which would make her the earliest author known by name, though some scholars doubt she wrote them.
PeopleEnheduanna · Sargon of Akkad
A stepped temple tower for Nanna, the moon god, built by King Ur-Nammu around 2100 BCE and remodelled by Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, in the sixth century BCE. Its lower stage survives.
PeopleUr-Nammu
A king's search for immortality, told in one of the oldest great works of literature. Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh were written down by the early second millennium BCE and an Old Babylonian epic followed; the flood story of Utnapishtim, so close to the account of Noah, is known from the eleventh tablet of the later Standard Babylonian version.
Papyrus scrolls of spells buried with the dead to guide them through the underworld. The best known scene shows the heart weighed against the feather of Maat.
Sanskrit hymns to Agni, Indra, Soma and others, passed down by memory for thousands of years with remarkable accuracy. It is the oldest of the Vedas and still recited in rituals today.
A pharaoh put the sun disc, the Aten, above all other gods and built a new capital in its honour. After his death the old gods were restored and his city was abandoned.
PeopleAkhenaten · Nefertiti
A treaty between the Hittite king and the kingdom of Mitanni calls Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatyas as divine witnesses. Mitanni's ruling class bore Indo-Aryan names, and this is the earliest datable record of gods later found in the Vedas, written far from India.
Clay tablets from a port city on the Syrian coast tell how the storm god Baal defeated the sea god Yam, won a palace with the consent of El, father of the gods, and his consort Athirat (Asherah), and was killed by Mot, Death, until the goddess Anat cut Mot down and Baal returned. They are the closest surviving relatives of the religious world the Hebrew Bible grew from.
The craftsmen who cut and painted the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived in a walled village whose ostraca, papyri and stelae record the religion of ordinary people. They prayed to Meretseger, the cobra goddess of the peak above the valley, and venerated the deified king Amenhotep I and his mother Ahmose-Nefertari, whose oracle gave judgments in the village court.
PeopleAmenhotep I · Ahmose-Nefertari
About fifteen years after the battle of Kadesh, Hattusili III of Hatti and Ramesses II of Egypt swore a treaty of peace and mutual defence. The Egyptian copy at Karnak describes the seals on the lost silver tablet: the Storm God embracing the king on one face and, on the other, the Sun Goddess of Arinna embracing Queen Puduhepa, a queen from Kizzuwatna whose own prayers to the goddess survive.
PeoplePuduhepa · Hattusili III · Ramesses II
Kings asked their ancestors and the high god Di about harvests, wars and illness. Diviners cracked ox bones and turtle shells with heat, then carved the question and answer into them. These carvings are the earliest known body of Chinese writing.
A victory inscription of Pharaoh Merneptah, mostly about his defeat of the Libyans, ends with a short list of beaten enemies in Canaan that includes 'Israel'. It is the earliest known mention of Israel outside the Bible, and the hieroglyphs mark the name as a people rather than a city or a land.
PeopleMerneptah · Flinders Petrie
The Gathas, seventeen hymns in Old Avestan, are traditionally the work of Zarathustra, a priest-poet who taught that Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, is the source of all good and that each person must choose between truth and the lie. When he lived is disputed, and some scholars doubt that the hymns are the work of a single historical teacher. Later Avestan texts developed his ideas into a full account of judgement, heaven and hell, and a future saviour.
PeopleZarathustra (Zoroaster)
The first great civilisation of Mesoamerica carved giant basalt heads, probably of rulers, and depicted a were-jaguar and a maize god. Many later Mesoamerican beliefs may have roots here.
According to the Bible, King Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant. It was not the only Israelite shrine: the Bible names rival royal sanctuaries at Bethel and Dan, and a small temple with an altar has been excavated at Arad; the Bible credits Hezekiah and Josiah with closing the shrines outside Jerusalem. Its exact history is debated, because no remains of the building itself have been found.
PeopleSolomon
A temple threaded with dark stone corridors where pilgrims met the Lanzón, a fanged deity carved on a blade-shaped stone. Its art and cult spread a shared religious style across much of Peru.
At a remote way-station on the desert road between the Gulf of Aqaba and Gaza, excavators found blessings painted on storage jars and wall plaster that invoke 'Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah' and 'Yahweh of Teman and his asherah', beside the names of El and Baal. Whether asherah here means the goddess or a cult object is still argued, but the finds show early worship of Yahweh sitting within a wider world of gods.
The Olympic Games began as a religious festival in the sanctuary of Zeus, with sacrifices alongside the races. By tradition they were held every four years for more than a thousand years.
Romans dated their city to 753 BCE. At its heart burned the fire of Vesta, tended by priestesses whose care was believed to keep Rome safe.
In dialogues set at royal courts and in teachers' households, sages and kings asked what the self is and how it relates to the ground of all being; two women, Gārgī and Maitreyī, put their questions to the sage Yājñavalkya. Karma, rebirth and liberation take shape here.
PeopleYājñavalkya · Gārgī Vācaknavī · Maitreyī
2 Kings tells how a scroll of the law was found in the Temple during repairs, and how King Josiah, after consulting the prophet Huldah, closed the shrines outside Jerusalem, tore down the altar at Bethel and held a Passover in the capital. Most scholars identify the scroll with an early form of Deuteronomy, which demands a single place of sacrifice; how much of the account is history and how much later writing is debated.
PeopleJosiah · Huldah · Hilkiah
Two tiny rolled sheets of silver, worn as amulets and buried with their owners in a burial cave, carry words close to the priestly blessing of Numbers 6. Most scholars date them to just before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, which makes them the oldest known objects bearing a text found in the Hebrew Bible, centuries older than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
PeopleGabriel Barkay
Babylon destroyed the Temple and deported Judah's elite. In exile, scribes gathered and reshaped the traditions that became the Hebrew Bible.
Each spring, in the month of Nisannu, Babylon kept the Akitu festival for Marduk. The creation epic Enuma Elish was recited before the god in his temple of Esagila, Nabu was brought by boat to join him, and the gods were carried in procession to a festival house outside the walls of the city that Nebuchadnezzar II had rebuilt. A ritual tablet copied in the Hellenistic period describes the high priest stripping the king of his insignia and striking his cheek before Marduk.
After Cyrus of Persia took Babylon in 539 BCE, a foundation inscription in his name was composed in Akkadian by the priests of Marduk. In it Marduk searches for a righteous king, chooses Cyrus, condemns the last Babylonian king Nabonidus, and lets Cyrus enter Babylon without a battle; Cyrus then returns the gods and their peoples to the sanctuaries from which they had been removed. The text does not mention Judah, though the Bible records Cyrus permitting the exiles to go home.
PeopleCyrus the Great · Nabonidus
A search for meaning. A new way of seeing.
By tradition a prince, Siddhārtha Gautama left his home, sat beneath a fig tree and awoke to the Four Noble Truths. He taught a Middle Way between indulgence and self-denial for more than forty years.
PeopleSiddhārtha Gautama · Ānanda
A deeper discipline. A kinder world.
The 24th and last Tīrthaṅkara of this age taught strict non-violence toward every living being and hard discipline as the way to free the soul.
PeopleVardhamāna Mahāvīra
Teachings, rituals and ideas travel across a changing world.
An aspiring official turned teacher placed humaneness (rén), ritual propriety (lǐ) and devotion to family (xiào) at the centre of a good life and good government. He upheld the sacrifices to ancestors and spirits, and spoke of Heaven (tiān) as the source of his virtue and his mission. His teachings shaped East Asia for more than two thousand years.
PeopleKong Qiu (Confucius) · Yan Hui · Zilu
On a cliff above the road from Babylon into Media, Darius I had his victory over the usurper Gaumata and nine rebel kings carved in relief, with a text in Elamite, Babylonian and Old Persian that credits his kingship to the favour of Ahuramazda. He thanks Ahuramazda 'and the other gods', never mentions Zarathustra, and whether he was a Zoroastrian is still debated; palace records from Persepolis show the same state supplying offerings for Elamite gods as well.
PeopleDarius I
Exiles returning under Persian rule rebuilt the Temple. The Persian period saw the Torah take something close to its final form.
Buddhist tradition holds that soon after the Buddha's death, 500 senior monks met to recite his teachings, Ānanda the discourses and Upāli the monastic rules. Many scholars doubt it happened as told.
PeopleMahākassapa · Ānanda · Upāli
The five books of Moses reached close to their final form in the Persian period. The Bible describes Ezra reading the Law aloud to the people of Jerusalem.
PeopleEzra
A marble temple to Athena, patron goddess of Athens, built at the height of the city's power. Inside stood a colossal statue of the goddess in gold and ivory.
Aramaic papyri from a Judean garrison on an island in the Nile record a community with its own temple of Yahu, where sacrifices were offered, and whose members also gave to other deities. After the temple was destroyed in 410 BCE, the community wrote to the governor of Judah for leave to rebuild it. The papers of Mibtahiah, a woman who owned houses, married an Egyptian and held the right to divorce, give a rare picture of ordinary Jewish life in the fifth century BCE.
PeopleMibtahiah
Two great epics took shape over centuries. The Mahābhārata includes the Bhagavad Gītā, where Krishna counsels Arjuna on duty and devotion. The Rāmāyaṇa follows Rama's quest to rescue Sita.
PeopleVyāsa (traditional)
Socrates was charged with not honouring the city's gods and with corrupting the young. He was condemned to drink hemlock. His death became a founding story for Western philosophy.
PeopleSocrates · Plato
The Daodejing, the Classic of the Way and its Power, is traditionally credited to the sage Laozi, said to have been an elder contemporary of Confucius. It praises the Dao, the nameless Way, and wúwéi, effortless action. Most scholars think the text took shape between the fourth and third centuries BCE, and whether Laozi existed at all is still debated.
PeopleLaozi · Zhuangzi (later)
After his bloody conquest of Kalinga, Emperor Ashoka proclaimed his remorse and devoted himself to his dhamma, a public ethic of non-harm, truthfulness and respect for every sect rather than Buddhist doctrine. He had it carved on rocks and pillars across his empire and sent envoys abroad.
PeopleAshoka · Mahinda · Saṅghamittā
By the Sri Lankan chronicles, Ashoka's son Mahinda converted King Devānampiya Tissa, who gave the monks the Mahāmegha park at Anurādhapura, and Ashoka's daughter Saṅghamittā brought a cutting of the Bodhi tree. The Mahāvihāra founded there became the ancestor of the lineage later called Theravāda.
PeopleMahinda · Saṅghamittā · Devānampiya Tissa
Jewish scholars translated the Torah into Greek for Alexandria's large Jewish community. It became the Bible of the early Church.
In 195 BCE the founding emperor of the Han stopped at Qufu and offered Confucius the tailao, the grandest sacrifice of the day. Offerings to the sage's spirit became a rite of state, and the Qufu temple, by tradition founded soon after his death, was rebuilt and enlarged many times under imperial patronage over the next two thousand years.
PeopleEmperor Gaozu of Han
The Maccabees revolted after the Seleucid king Antiochus IV banned Jewish practice. When they retook Jerusalem, they purified and rededicated the Temple, the event Hanukkah remembers.
PeopleJudah Maccabee
Jews of the late Second Temple period copied scripture and wrote rules and hymns, some probably at Qumran itself. The scrolls were hidden in caves around 68 CE and found by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947.
According to the Sri Lankan chronicles, monks in the 1st century BCE wrote down the orally transmitted teachings so that the doctrine would endure. The result is the Tipiṭaka, the 'Three Baskets'.
Scriptures presenting themselves as the Buddha's own sermons taught the bodhisattva path to full Buddhahood for the sake of all beings, along with emptiness and cosmic Buddhas. They grew up inside existing monastic communities rather than in a separate sect, and the first firm date is Lokakṣema's Chinese translations at Luoyang around 179 CE.
A Jewish teacher from Nazareth preached the kingdom of God, healed and told parables. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. His followers proclaimed that he rose from the dead, and a new movement spread from Jerusalem.
PeopleJesus of Nazareth · Mary Magdalene · Peter
The apostle Paul wrote to small communities across the Roman world. His letters are the earliest surviving Christian writings, older than the Gospels.
PeoplePaul of Tarsus
A Chinese legend says Emperor Ming dreamed of a golden figure and sent envoys west, who returned with monks and sūtras carried on white horses. Historians treat the tale as later pious tradition: Buddhism was carried into Han China by Central Asian merchants and monks during the 1st century CE, and the first surviving Chinese translations were made at Luoyang in the 2nd century. It went on to become one of China's Three Teachings.
Roman legions under Titus burned the Temple at the end of the revolt that had begun in 66 CE, ending sacrificial worship there. Synagogues, prayer and the study of Torah already existed and carried on. Rabbinic tradition remembers Yohanan ben Zakkai founding a school at Yavneh with Roman leave, and over the centuries that followed the rabbis' Judaism, rooted in the Pharisees, took shape.
PeopleTitus · Yohanan ben Zakkai
Long after Aramaic and Greek had replaced Akkadian in daily life, scholars attached to the temples of Babylon and Uruk kept writing on clay, mostly astronomy, ritual and omens. The latest datable tablet is an astronomical almanac from Uruk composed in the 70s CE, and with it a writing tradition more than three thousand years old fades from the record.
Four accounts of Jesus' life were written in the later first century. Mark came first, and Matthew and Luke drew on it.
By tradition, in 142 CE the deified Laozi appeared to Zhang Daoling in Sichuan and named him Celestial Master. His followers built a church with parishes, priests and written confession of sins, and treated illness as the fruit of wrongdoing. It is the earliest organised Daoist religion.
PeopleZhang Daoling · Zhang Lu
A vast planned city laid out along the Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and a temple to the Feathered Serpent. The Aztecs later found its ruins and named it Teotihuacan, 'place of the gods'.
Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi is credited with arranging the teachings of the earliest rabbis, the tannaim, into six orders of Hebrew law. It records disagreements as well as rulings, and whether it was first written down or memorised is debated. It is the foundation of the Talmud.
PeopleJudah ha-Nasi
Mani taught that light and darkness are locked in a cosmic struggle, and presented himself as the last in a line of prophets after the Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus. His religion spread from North Africa to China.
PeopleMani
Maya kings built temple-cities such as Tikal, Palenque and Copán and recorded their dynasties in hieroglyphs on carved stone. Rulers and queens drew their own blood as offerings to the gods, and priests kept a 260-day ritual calendar alongside the solar year. After about 900 the great southern lowland cities emptied, but Maya cities in Yucatán flourished for centuries more, and Maya people still live across the region today, where highland day-keepers keep the 260-day count.
PeopleLady K'abal Xook
Plotinus taught that everything flows from the One and that the soul can rise back to it through contemplation. His ideas deeply influenced Christian, Jewish and Islamic mysticism.
PeoplePlotinus · Porphyry
Around 270 a young Egyptian named Antony gave away his land and took up a life of prayer and fasting, later living alone for some twenty years in an abandoned fort at Pispir. Others followed him into the desert, and the Life of Antony written by Bishop Athanasius carried the ideal across the Christian world. Pachomius soon gathered monks into walled communities under a common rule.
PeopleAntony of Egypt · Athanasius of Alexandria · Pachomius
King Tiridates III, converted by Gregory the Illuminator, made Armenia the first kingdom to adopt Christianity as its state religion.
PeopleGregory the Illuminator · Tiridates III
After meeting at Milan early in 313, Constantine and Licinius agreed that Christians and everyone else might worship as they chose, and that property seized from the churches be returned. The text survives as a letter Licinius had posted in the East in June 313; it confirmed an end to persecution that Galerius had already conceded in 311.
PeopleConstantine · Licinius
Constantine called the first empire-wide council of bishops to settle the dispute over Arius, who taught that the Son of God had a beginning and was not eternal like the Father. The council declared the Son 'of one substance' with the Father. The creed recited today in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and many Protestant churches is the fuller version issued at Constantinople in 381.
PeopleConstantine · Athanasius · Arius · Alexander of Alexandria
King Ezana of Aksum adopted Christianity in the mid-fourth century. It began one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions in the world.
PeopleEzana · Frumentius
In his Easter letter for 367, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria named the 27 books that make up today's New Testament, the earliest surviving list to match it exactly. It recorded one church's practice rather than settling the question: Syriac churches long used a New Testament of 22 books, and doubts about Revelation lingered in the Greek East.
PeopleAthanasius of Alexandria
Theodosius I ordered his subjects to hold the faith taught by the bishops of Rome and Alexandria and branded everyone else a heretic. Over the next decade his laws banned sacrifice and ordered temples shut, though the old cults did not vanish at once.
PeopleTheodosius I
Under the Guptas the earliest surviving freestanding Hindu stone temples were built, and the worship of Vishnu, Shiva and the Goddess was well established. The Purāṇas began to gather the stories of the gods.
For a thousand years and more, Zoroastrian priests had carried the Avesta in memory. Under the Sasanian kings (224 to 651) the texts were gathered and written in a new alphabet designed to capture every sound of the recitation, most likely in the 4th century, though the date is debated.
A monk from the Silk Road city of Kucha, captured by a Chinese army and held for years in the north-west, was brought to Chang'an in 401 (some sources say early 402), where the ruler Yao Xing put him at the head of a large state-backed translation team. His Chinese versions of the Lotus, Diamond, Vimalakīrti and Amitābha sūtras became the standard ones in East Asia.
PeopleKumārajīva · Yao Xing
Called by Emperor Theodosius II, the council was run by Cyril of Alexandria, who had Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, deposed for refusing to call Mary Theotokos, 'God-bearer'. Bishops from Antioch arrived late, held a rival synod and deposed Cyril in turn; a compromise formula reunited the two sides in 433. The Church of the East in Persia never accepted the verdict and went its own way.
PeopleCyril of Alexandria · Nestorius · Theodosius II
In the Gupta age a monastery at Nālandā grew into the largest centre of Buddhist learning in India. Pilgrims from China studied there for years and carried its texts home. Around 1200 raiders sacked the monasteries of Bihar, and Nālandā was abandoned.
PeopleXuanzang · Yijing
Emperor Marcian, with the empress Pulcheria, called the council, which declared Christ one person in two natures, following a letter of Pope Leo I, and deposed Dioscorus of Alexandria. The churches of Egypt, Syria and Armenia, today's Oriental Orthodox, rejected the formula. The Church of the East in Persia, which had never accepted Ephesus in 431, stood on the opposite side of the argument.
PeopleLeo I · Dioscorus of Alexandria · Pulcheria · Marcian
Generations of rabbis argued out the meaning of the Mishnah, and their debates were edited into a vast work of law, lore and logic that is still studied daily.
Chinese records of the 6th and 7th centuries mention a monk from the west called Bodhidharma who taught a meditation known as 'wall-gazing'. Later Chan (Japanese Zen) lineages made him their first patriarch, and Song-dynasty compilers gave the school its famous motto of a transmission outside the scriptures that does not rest on words; most scholars treat this history as the tradition's own construction.
PeopleBodhidharma · Huineng
Buddhism had reached the northern Korean kingdom of Goguryeo in 372 and Baekje soon after, but Silla's nobles held out. Korean tradition says that in 527 the court official Ichadon offered his life to end the stalemate: he was beheaded, wonders followed, and the shaken ministers gave way. King Beopheung then recognised the religion.
PeopleIchadon · King Beopheung
Benedict of Nursia settled on Monte Cassino around 529 and wrote a Rule for monks: a prologue and 73 chapters on prayer at fixed hours, work, reading, food, sleep and the authority of the abbot. Nearly all we know of him comes from Pope Gregory the Great's Dialogues. Cluny in 910 and the Cistercians after it were founded to live by the Rule, which became the standard rule of Western monasticism.
PeopleBenedict of Nursia · Scholastica · Gregory the Great · Hildegard of Bingen
For a century and more after other Egyptian temples fell silent, Isis was still worshipped on the island of Philae, where Nubian peoples from the south kept the right to come and pray under a treaty with Rome. Procopius reports that the emperor Justinian ordered the sanctuaries shut and the priests seized. Philae holds the last dated hieroglyphic inscription anywhere, carved in 394 CE.
PeopleJustinian I
After rioters burned the old cathedral in 532, Justinian I had a new Church of Holy Wisdom raised in about five years, its vast dome floating above marble and gold mosaic. It served as the cathedral of Constantinople until the Ottoman conquest of 1453, then as a mosque, from 1935 as a museum, and since 2020 as a mosque again.
PeopleJustinian I · Anthemius of Tralles · Isidore of Miletus
The chronicles say that in the mid-6th century the king of Baekje in Korea sent the Yamato court a Buddha image and sūtras. The Soga clan took up the new faith, and under Empress Suiko, the first woman recorded as reigning in Japan, and her regent Prince Shōtoku, Buddhism won court backing and its first great temples.
PeoplePrince Shōtoku · Empress Suiko
By tradition, in about 610 Muhammad received the first verses of the Qur'an during Ramadan in a cave on Mount Ḥirāʾ, beginning with the command 'Recite!' The revelations continued until his death in 632. The date rests on later Islamic biographies, so historians treat it as approximate.
PeopleMuhammad · Khadija · Angel Jibrīl (Gabriel)
Facing persecution, Muhammad and his followers moved to Yathrib, later called Medina, where the first Muslim community was formed.
When Muhammad died in Medina in 632, Muslims disagreed over who should lead. Most accepted Abū Bakr, chosen at a meeting of Medinan and Meccan Muslims, while some held that ʿAlī, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, was his rightful heir. Later Sunni and Shiʿi memory traces its divide to this moment, though distinct communities took shape only over the following centuries.
PeopleAbu Bakr · ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib · Fāṭima
Months before his death, Muhammad led a pilgrimage to Mecca that tradition treats as the model for the hajj. Every Muslim who is able must make the journey once, and each year pilgrims circle the Kaʿba, stand at ʿArafat and end with the sacrifice of Eid al-Adha.
PeopleMuhammad
A monk called Alopen arrived at the Tang capital from Persia in 635, and in 638 Emperor Taizong permitted his 'luminous teaching' and paid for a monastery. The story is told on a stone stele set up in 781, in Chinese and Syriac, which lay buried until the 1620s. Christianity in Tang China faded after a ban on foreign religions in 845.
PeopleAlopen
Tang histories record that the Chinese princess Wencheng travelled to Tibet around 641 to marry King Songtsen Gampo. Tibetan histories written centuries later credit her and a Nepalese wife, Bhrikuti, with bringing Buddha images and inspiring the Jokhang and Ramoche temples in Lhasa, and credit the king's minister with devising the Tibetan script. Buddhism became the state religion only a century later, under Trisong Detsen.
PeopleSongtsen Gampo · Princess Wencheng · Bhrikuti
Troubled by contradictions in the Chinese scriptures, the monk Xuanzang slipped out of China without permission in 629 (some sources say 627), crossed the deserts and mountains of Central Asia, and studied for years at Nālandā, India's great monastic university. He came home to Chang'an in 645 with hundreds of texts and spent the rest of his life translating them.
PeopleXuanzang · Śīlabhadra
Tradition holds that the Qur'an was first gathered into a single written copy soon after Muhammad's death, under Abū Bakr or ʿUmar, by his scribe Zayd ibn Thābit. Around 650 Caliph ʿUthmān had a standard consonantal text copied, sent to the main garrison cities and ordered rival versions destroyed.
PeopleʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān · Zayd ibn Thābit
Poet-saints sang to Śiva and Viṣṇu at the temples of the Tamil country, in Tamil rather than Sanskrit. The Śaiva Nāyaṉmār and Vaiṣṇava Āḻvārs came from many castes and included women, and their hymns are still sung in temples today.
PeopleAppar · Campantar · Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār · Nammāḻvār · Āṇṭāḷ
The Prophet's grandson Husayn and a small band refused to swear allegiance to the Umayyad caliph Yazid and were killed. The martyrdom is central to Shiʿa identity and is mourned every year on Ashura.
PeopleHusayn ibn ʿAlī · Zaynab bint ʿAlī
Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik's shrine over the rock on Jerusalem's Temple Mount is one of the oldest surviving monuments of Islamic architecture. Its mosaic inscriptions quote the Qur'an on the oneness of God and reject the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus; the link to Muhammad's Night Journey became prominent only centuries later.
Japan's oldest chronicle was written down from oral tradition and presented to the court in 712. Its first book tells how the gods made the islands and how the sun goddess Amaterasu's line became the imperial house; Shinto thought has drawn on it ever since. Amaterasu's shrine at Ise is rebuilt every twenty years.
Emperor Leo III turned against the veneration of icons in the 720s, and for more than a century the empire swung between banning holy images and restoring them. Two empresses ended the two phases: Irene, whose council at Nicaea in 787 approved the honouring of icons, and Theodora, who restored them for good in 843. Some historians warn that the accounts of the earliest years were written by the winners.
PeopleLeo III · Constantine V · Irene · Theodora
King Trisong Detsen brought the Indian scholar Śāntarakṣita and, tradition says, the tantric master Padmasambhava to build Tibet's first monastery, completed around 779, where the first Tibetans were ordained as monks. A few years later the court staged a debate between a Chinese Chan teacher and Śāntarakṣita's Indian pupil Kamalaśīla on sudden versus gradual awakening; Tibetan accounts say the king ruled for the Indian side.
PeopleTrisong Detsen · Śāntarakṣita · Padmasambhava · Kamalaśīla
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, an Umayyad prince who had fled to Spain, began a mosque whose double tiers of red and white arches were enlarged by his successors over two centuries. After Castile took Córdoba in 1236 it became a cathedral, and a Renaissance cathedral was built into its heart from 1523.
PeopleʿAbd al-Raḥmān I · al-Ḥakam II
A young philosopher taught that the self (ātman) and ultimate reality (Brahman) are one. Tradition says he walked the length of India and founded monasteries at its four corners.
PeopleĀdi Śaṅkara
A mountain of stone that pilgrims climb in a spiral, passing carved scenes of the Buddha's lives on the way up to open terraces of stupas. It is among the largest Buddhist monuments in the world.
On Christmas Day 800 Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charles as emperor in St Peter's; his biographer Einhard claimed that Charles would never have entered the church that day had he known the pope's plan. Charles had spent three decades subduing the pagan Saxons and forcing them to accept baptism: his law for Saxony made refusing it a capital offence, and in 782 he had 4,500 Saxon captives executed at Verden, as the royal annals record.
PeopleCharlemagne · Pope Leo III · Alcuin of York · Einhard
Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, remembered as an early ascetic of Basra, taught that God should be loved for himself alone, not from fear of hell or hope of paradise. Her life is known only through much later accounts, above all ʿAṭṭār's thirteenth-century lives of the saints.
PeopleRābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya · Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār
Two monks who sailed to Tang China in 804 came home with new schools. Saichō returned in 805 to build Tendai on Mount Hiei, whose monastery became the training ground for most of Japan's later founders; Kūkai returned in 806 with the esoteric teachings of his master Huiguo and established Shingon. The two schools dominated Japanese Buddhism for centuries.
PeopleSaichō · Kūkai
Under the Abbasids, scholars of different faiths translated Greek, Persian and other works into Arabic. They debated, and advanced mathematics, medicine and philosophy.
Peopleal-Khwārizmī · Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq · al-Kindī
Emperor Wuzong, a devout Daoist facing an empty treasury, ordered Buddhist monasteries closed, their land and wealth seized and their monks and nuns sent back to lay life; the government's own count put the laicised at more than 260,000. Zoroastrians and the Christians of the Church of the East were shut down too. The Japanese pilgrim Ennin lived through it and described it in his diary. The suppression ended soon after Wuzong's death in 846.
PeopleEmperor Wuzong · Ennin
In the ninth century scholars sifted a vast mass of reports about Muhammad's words and deeds into collections such as the Ṣaḥīḥs of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, which Sunnis rank second only to the Qur'an. The four Sunni schools of law took their names from Abū Ḥanīfa, Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī and Ibn Ḥanbal.
Peopleal-Bukhārī · Muslim ibn al-Ḥajjāj · al-Shāfiʿī · Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal
Two brothers from Thessalonica, sent by Emperor Michael III at the request of Prince Rastislav of Moravia, began preaching in Slavonic in 863. Cyril devised an alphabet, Glagolitic, and the brothers translated scripture and the liturgy, which Pope Adrian II approved in Rome. German bishops fought the Slavonic rite, and after Methodius died their disciples were driven out to Bulgaria, where the Cyrillic alphabet was created.
PeopleCyril (Constantine) · Methodius · Rastislav of Moravia
A woodblock-printed scroll of the Diamond Sūtra ends with a note that Wang Jie had it made in 868 for free distribution on behalf of his parents. It is the oldest surviving printed book that carries a date. Sealed in a cave library at Dunhuang for centuries, it was found in 1900 and taken to London by the archaeologist Aurel Stein in 1907.
PeopleWang Jie · Aurel Stein
Olga ruled Kyivan Rus' as regent after her husband Igor was killed by his subjects while collecting tribute in 945. She became the first ruler of the Rus' to be baptised, and visited Constantinople, in 957 by the usual dating, where Emperor Constantine VII received her at court. Her son stayed pagan, but her grandson Vladimir brought the whole land into the church in 988.
PeopleOlga of Kyiv · Constantine VII
Grand Prince Vladimir had himself and his people baptised into Byzantine Christianity. The chronicles say the old idols were torn down and Perun's statue cast into the Dnieper.
A movement that honoured the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim began preaching openly. The call closed in 1043, and since then no one has been able to convert in or out.
Anawrahta, who took the throne of Pagan in 1044, built the first Burmese empire and gave royal backing to Theravāda monks. Chronicles say the Mon monk Shin Arahan converted him and that in 1057 he seized the scriptures of Thaton and carried them north. Over the next two centuries kings and commoners covered the plain with thousands of brick temples and stupas, each built to earn merit.
PeopleAnawrahta · Shin Arahan
Between about 850 and 1150 ancestral Pueblo people built great houses such as Pueblo Bonito, with more than 500 rooms, and huge round great kivas for ceremony, in a dry canyon in New Mexico. Roads ran out for hundreds of kilometres to outlying communities, buildings and rock carvings tracked the sun's yearly path, and scarlet macaws were brought from Mexico. Only a few thousand people lived in the canyon; many scholars see it as a ceremonial centre.
Around 1050 a Mississippian city grew rapidly on the floodplain east of today's St Louis, the largest settlement north of Mexico. Its people raised Monks Mound, the biggest earthen mound in North America, set up circles of cedar posts aligned to the solstices, and buried hundreds of people in Mound 72, many of them young women who had been sacrificed. The city declined after about 1200 and was abandoned within the next two centuries.
On 16 July 1054 Cardinal Humbert, a papal legate, laid a bull excommunicating Patriarch Michael Cerularius on the altar of Hagia Sophia, and the patriarch's synod answered by excommunicating the legates. Pope Leo IX had died in April, before the bull was laid. Many historians see the split as a gradual process, with the crusaders' sack of Constantinople in 1204, rather than 1054, as the point at which the breach became final.
Answering an appeal for help from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I, Pope Urban II called on Latin Christians at Clermont in November 1095 to march east and take Jerusalem. On the way, in May 1096, crusader bands, among them one led by Count Emicho, attacked the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne and killed well over a thousand people. When the crusaders stormed Jerusalem in July 1099 they massacred many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants, and the states they set up lasted nearly two centuries.
At the temple town of Śrīraṅgam, Rāmānuja gave devotion to a personal God a rigorous philosophy. Against Śaṅkara he taught Viśiṣṭādvaita, 'qualified non-duality': souls and the world are real, and they form the body of Viṣṇu, whom the soul exists to serve.
PeopleRāmānuja
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, chief professor at Baghdad's Niẓāmiyya, left his post in 1095 after a crisis of certainty, lived for years as a Sufi and wrote The Revival of the Religious Sciences. He is widely credited with making Sufism acceptable within Sunni orthodoxy.
Peopleal-Ghazālī · Niẓām al-Mulk · Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
Built as a Hindu temple to Vishnu, it later became a Buddhist site. It is the largest religious monument on Earth.
Basava, an official at the court of King Bijjala of Kalyāṇa, led a Śaiva movement in Karnataka that rejected caste, Brahman priesthood and the authority of the Vedas. Its members, the Liṅgāyats, wear a small liṅga on the body and sing his vachanas, plain Kannada poems to Śiva as 'lord of the meeting rivers'.
PeopleBasava
Having united the island, King Parākramabāhu I gathered the monks, expelled those he judged unworthy and merged Sri Lanka's three rival fraternities under the Mahāvihāra. The chronicle says he blended the Order like milk and water. Monks from Burma, Thailand and elsewhere on the mainland sought ordination in this reformed line, which became the ancestor of Southeast Asian Theravāda.
PeopleParākramabāhu I
A physician, philosopher and legal scholar tried to reconcile Torah with Aristotle. His Thirteen Principles are still sung in synagogues.
PeopleMoses Maimonides (Rambam)
Zhu Xi reworked Confucian teaching around 'principle' (lǐ) and 'vital force' (qì) and made four short texts, the Analects, Mencius, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean, the core of learning. From the early fourteenth century, under the Yuan, his commentaries were the set reading for the civil service examinations, which lasted until 1905, and his school shaped Korea and Japan as well.
PeopleZhu Xi
Eleven churches carved downward out of solid rock, meant as a 'New Jerusalem'. Pilgrims still crowd them for Christmas, which Ethiopians call Genna.
PeopleKing Lalibela
A crusade preached by Innocent III for Jerusalem ran out of money, took the Christian city of Zara for Venice, then backed a Byzantine claimant. When his promises failed, the crusaders stormed Constantinople on 12–13 April 1204 and plundered it for days, stripping Hagia Sophia and carrying off relics. A Latin emperor ruled until the Byzantines retook the city in 1261. The pope accepted the conquest but condemned the bloodshed when he learned of it.
PeopleInnocent III · Enrico Dandolo · Baldwin of Flanders
Francis of Assisi took a small band of companions to Rome in 1209 or 1210, and Pope Innocent III gave spoken approval to their way of life. The Friars Minor owned nothing and went out to preach penance; Clare of Assisi joined the movement in 1212 and led its sisters at San Damiano. The Rule that Pope Honorius III confirmed in 1223 became the order's definitive rule.
PeopleFrancis of Assisi · Clare of Assisi · Pope Innocent III
Pope Innocent III gathered over 400 bishops and hundreds of abbots and priors in Rome in November 1215. Their canons, about 70 of them, reached into every parish: every adult was to confess to their own priest and receive communion at least once a year at Easter, the change of bread and wine in the Mass was defined as transubstantiation, new religious orders were forbidden, clergy were barred from blessing trials by ordeal, and Jews and Muslims were ordered to wear distinguishing dress.
PeoplePope Innocent III
Within a century, monks trained on Tendai's Mount Hiei struck out with simpler paths: Hōnen's exclusive nembutsu to Amida, Dōgen's seated Zen and Nichiren's chant to the Lotus Sūtra. Shinran, Hōnen's disciple, founded no organisation; his descendants later built his following into the Honganji, which Rennyo made a mass movement. Historians now stress that Tendai and Shingon remained Japan's religious establishment for centuries more.
PeopleHōnen · Shinran · Dōgen · Nichiren · Rennyo
Muʿīn al-Dīn, a Sufi from Sistan, settled at Ajmer around 1200 and died there in 1236. The Chishtī order he planted became one of the most widespread Sufi orders in South Asia, and devotional music is central to its gatherings. His tomb is one of the most visited shrines in India.
PeopleMuʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī · Niẓām al-Dīn Awliyāʾ
Polynesian settlers reached Rapa Nui around 1200 and soon began carving the moai: some 900 to 1,000 stone ancestors cut from the tuff of Rano Raraku and raised on ahu platforms, many crowned with red pukao from Puna Pau. Later the ancestor cult gave way to the birdman rites at Orongo.
With the court in exile on Ganghwa Island during the Mongol invasions, Goryeo had the entire Buddhist canon carved on some 80,000 woodblocks between 1237 and about 1251, replacing an earlier set the invaders had destroyed and appealing to the Buddha's protection. Prized for its accuracy, the set has been kept at Haeinsa since the end of the 14th century in halls designed to keep the blocks dry.
In Konya the Persian poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, heir to a Sufi tradition already centuries old, composed the Masnavi, a vast poem on the soul's longing for God. After his death in 1273 his followers were organised as the Mevlevi order, whose whirling samāʿ ceremony is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list.
PeopleRūmī · Shams of Tabriz
The central text of Kabbalah is a mystical commentary on the Torah, written mostly in Aramaic.
A stone inscription dated 1292 and attributed to King Ram Khamhaeng portrays Sukhothai, the first major Tai kingdom, as a prosperous Buddhist realm whose king patronised monks of the Sri Lankan lineage brought north from Nakhon Si Thammarat. It is the earliest known text in Thai script. Since the 1980s some scholars have argued that the stone is a 19th-century creation, though most accept it as at least partly genuine.
PeopleRam Khamhaeng · Mongkut
The ruler of Mali, a kingdom rich in gold, travelled to Mecca by way of Cairo. According to the Mamluk official al-ʿUmarī he gave away so much gold that Cairo's gold market was depressed for years. Tradition credits him with the mosques raised on his return, above all Timbuktu's Djinguereber.
PeopleMansa Mūsā · Abū Isḥāq al-Sāḥilī · al-ʿUmarī
According to Mexica tradition, their god Huitzilopochtli showed them where to settle with a sign, an eagle on a cactus, and they built an island city in Lake Texcoco. The Templo Mayor at its centre honoured Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc.
Plague reached Sicily and Italy by ship in 1347 and over the next few years killed perhaps a third or more of Europe's people. Many read it as God's judgement: bands of flagellants whipped themselves through the towns of central Europe until Pope Clement VI banned them in October 1349, and mobs accused Jews of poisoning wells. On 14 February 1349 the townspeople of Strasbourg burned the city's Jews alive, about 2,000 by a chronicler's count, although Clement had declared the charge false and given Jews refuge at Avignon.
PeoplePope Clement VI
Around 1400 a prince from Palembang founded Melaka on the strait between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Its early rulers adopted Islam, and as the region's chief trading port the sultanate became a centre for spreading the faith through the archipelago, until the Portuguese seized it in 1511.
PeopleParameswara
Machu Picchu was a royal estate of the Inca ruler Pachacuti, built high in the Andes in the 15th century. Inca religion reached far beyond the sun god Inti: it honoured the creator Viracocha and many huacas, sacred places and objects, around Cusco and across the empire. The chief temple was the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, in Cusco; after the conquest the Spanish built their churches over the Inca temples.
PeoplePachacuti
A Muslim weaver of Banaras, Kabīr sang in plain Hindi against empty ritual, mocking Brahmans and qazis in the same breath. His verses passed by word of mouth before being written down, and Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs all claim him.
PeopleKabīr
After a siege of nearly two months, Sultan Mehmed II's army broke through the land walls on 29 May 1453. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting, and Mehmed rode to Hagia Sophia and made it a mosque. The thousand-year Roman empire of the East was gone; the next year the sultan installed Gennadios II as patriarch, and the Orthodox church lived on under Ottoman rule.
PeopleMehmed II · Constantine XI · Gennadios II Scholarios
The first major book printed in Europe with movable metal type. Its Latin text was set in 42-line columns, and copies were sold across Europe.
PeopleJohannes Gutenberg
In 1491 the manikongo Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised as João I, and under his son Afonso I the Kongo kingdom adopted Christianity as its religion, keeping much of its older belief alongside it. Kongo's church lasted for centuries. Enslaved Kongolese later carried their religion, including its Christian elements, across the Atlantic, where it became one of the sources of Haitian Vodou.
PeopleNzinga a Nkuwu (João I) · Afonso I
Ferdinand and Isabella ordered every Jew in their kingdoms to accept baptism or leave, on the grounds that Jews were drawing converts back to Judaism. Tens of thousands crossed into Portugal, and others sailed to North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire, where their descendants became known as the Sephardim. Among the converso-born exiles of the next generation was Doña Gracia Nasi, a banker and philanthropist who became a leading patron of Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire.
PeopleFerdinand II of Aragon · Isabella I of Castile · Doña Gracia Nasi
According to Sikh tradition, Nanak vanished for three days in a river at Sultanpur and came out saying 'There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.' He taught devotion to one God, honest work and sharing, and began a line of ten Gurus.
PeopleGuru Nanak · Bhai Mardana
Under the Songhai empire of Askia Muḥammad, Timbuktu's mosques and Qur'an schools drew scholars from across the Sahara; UNESCO puts its students at some 25,000. A Moroccan army with firearms crushed Songhai at Tondibi in 1591, and the occupiers later deported the jurist Aḥmad Bābā to Marrakesh.
PeopleAskia Muḥammad I · Aḥmad Bābā al-Timbuktī
Ismāʿīl I, aged about fourteen, took Tabriz, was crowned shah and proclaimed Twelver Shiʿism the religion of his new state. Iran was then mostly Sunni: historians describe a long conversion enforced by the state, in which Sunnis were persecuted, driven out or killed. Iran is today the country with the largest Shiʿi population.
PeopleIsmāʿīl I
Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor at Wittenberg, challenged the sale of indulgences in his Ninety-five Theses. Rome excommunicated him in January 1521 and he refused to recant at the Diet of Worms, but printing spread his ideas and princes took them up. Zwingli meanwhile was reforming Zürich, and Geneva under Calvin later became the centre of the Reformed tradition.
PeopleMartin Luther · Philip Melanchthon
Radical reformers baptised one another as adults, rejecting infant baptism and the state church. Their spiritual descendants include the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites.
PeopleConrad Grebel · Menno Simons
A Rajput princess of Merta married into the ruling house of Mewar, Mīrābāī treated Krishna as her true husband, defied her in-laws and, by tradition, left the palace to wander singing to him. Her songs of love for Krishna are among the best loved in northern India.
PeopleMīrābāī
Tradition holds that in December 1531 the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego, an Indigenous convert, on the hill of Tepeyac outside Mexico City, and left her image on his cloak. The earliest published accounts date from 1648 and 1649, and historians debate what lies behind them, but the devotion became the heart of Mexican Catholicism, and in 2002 Juan Diego was canonised.
PeopleJuan Diego
After the pope refused to annul Henry VIII's marriage, Parliament's Act of Supremacy of November 1534 made the king Supreme Head of the Church of England. Henry dissolved the monasteries between 1536 and 1540 but kept Catholic doctrine, enforced by the Six Articles of 1539; Cranmer's English Prayer Book came only in 1549 under Edward VI, and Elizabeth I's settlement of 1559 gave the church its lasting shape.
PeopleHenry VIII · Thomas Cranmer · Elizabeth I
Expelled from Geneva in 1538, John Calvin returned in September 1541, and the city's councils adopted his Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which organised the church under pastors, teachers, elders and deacons and set up a Consistory of pastors and elders to enforce discipline. Refugees flocked to the city, its magistrates burned Michael Servetus for heresy in 1553 with Calvin's support, and in 1559 an Academy was founded to train pastors. Calvin's Institutes became the standard theology of the Reformed churches.
PeopleJohn Calvin · Guillaume Farel · Michael Servetus
Renewal was already stirring inside Catholicism, with new religious orders founded from the 1520s and the Jesuits approved in 1540, before the council met at Trent. In 25 sessions between 1545 and 1563 it defined doctrine against Protestant teaching, reformed the clergy and ordered every diocese to found a seminary, shaping Catholicism for four centuries.
PeoplePope Paul III · Charles Borromeo · Teresa of Ávila
On 25 September 1555 the Imperial Diet at Augsburg agreed that each prince and free city of the Empire could choose either Catholicism or the Lutheran Augsburg Confession for its territory, a rule that jurists later summed up as cuius regio, eius religio. Calvinists, Anabaptists and others were excluded, and the settlement held until the Thirty Years' War began in 1618.
PeopleCharles V · Ferdinand I
In July 1562 the Franciscan Diego de Landa staged an auto-da-fé at Maní after finding that the Maya still worshipped their gods. His friars tortured thousands of Maya as idolaters and many died. Landa wrote that he burned all the Maya books he found, because they held only superstition, and that this grieved the Maya deeply. Only four pre-Hispanic Maya books survive.
PeopleDiego de Landa
Safed, a Galilean hill town filled with exiles from Spain, became the centre of Jewish mysticism in the 16th century; Joseph Karo wrote his law code, the Shulchan Arukh, there. Isaac Luria taught in Safed for only about two years before dying in an epidemic and left almost nothing in writing, yet his picture of a God who withdrew to make room for the world, of vessels that shattered at creation and of a repair that human deeds help complete spread across the Jewish world and shaped both the Shabbetai Tzevi movement and Hasidism.
PeopleIsaac Luria (the Ari) · Hayyim Vital · Joseph Karo · Moses Cordovero
The Mughal emperor Akbar invited Muslim, Hindu and Jesuit scholars, among others, to debate religion in his Ibādat Khāna, or House of Worship, at Fatehpur Sikri. He became known for his tolerance towards other faiths.
PeopleAkbar
The Mongol ruler Altan Khan invited the Gelug leader Sönam Gyatso to meet him in the Kokonor region and gave him the title Dalai Lama, 'ocean' teacher. Altan made Gelug Buddhism the religion of his people, the title was extended back to Sönam Gyatso's two predecessors so that he counts as the third, and the next Dalai Lama was found among Altan's own descendants.
PeopleAltan Khan · Sönam Gyatso, 3rd Dalai Lama
Between about 1560 and 1660 courts across Europe tried tens of thousands of people for witchcraft, a crime defined as a pact with the Devil. Modern estimates put the trials at roughly 100,000 and the executions at 40,000 to 50,000; about three-quarters of those executed were women, though the share varied from region to region. Catholic and Protestant territories executed witches alike, and the Jesuit Friedrich Spee's Cautio Criminalis of 1631 attacked the abuses of the trials.
PeopleFriedrich Spee · Anna Göldi
Guru Arjan compiled the hymns of the first five Gurus together with those of bhagats of the sant and Sufi traditions, among them Kabīr, Nāmdev, Ravidās and Shaikh Farīd, and installed the book in the Harmandir Sahib. Its doors open on four sides, a sign that all are welcome.
PeopleGuru Arjan
Scholars working in six companies revised earlier English versions, drawing heavily on Tyndale, whose wording, in phrases such as 'let there be light', passed into everyday English.
In 1614 the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity throughout Japan and expelled the missionaries; believers were made to renounce the faith, exiled or killed. After the rising at Shimabara and Amakusa in 1637–38, most of whose rebels were Christian peasants, was crushed, survivors passed the faith down in secret for over two centuries, until the ban was lifted in 1873.
In 1616 the Inquisition's consultors judged the claim that the Sun stands still at the centre of the world to be heretical, Copernicus's book was suspended, and Cardinal Bellarmine warned Galileo not to hold or defend the idea. After Galileo published his Dialogue in 1632 he was summoned to Rome, and in June 1633 the Holy Office declared him 'vehemently suspected of heresy'. He knelt to abjure, the Dialogue was banned, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest, from December 1633 at his villa at Arcetri, near Florence.
PeopleGalileo Galilei · Cardinal Robert Bellarmine · Pope Urban VIII
Güshi Khan of the Khoshut Mongols defeated the ruler of Tsang, patron of rival orders, and in 1642 conferred rule over Tibet on the Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso. His government, the Ganden Phodrang, united spiritual and temporal power in one office and governed Tibet until 1959; in 1645 he began the Potala Palace in Lhasa.
PeopleNgawang Lobsang Gyatso, 5th Dalai Lama · Güshi Khan
The Thirty Years' War began in 1618 as a Bohemian revolt against Habsburg rule, but by 1635 Catholic France was fighting the Catholic Habsburgs, and dynastic rivalry mixed with religion throughout. The treaties of Münster and Osnabrück extended the Peace of Augsburg to Calvinists, fixed 1624 as the reference year for each territory's religion, and are often said to have laid foundations for the modern state system.
A mystic from Smyrna was proclaimed messiah in 1665, with Nathan of Gaza as his prophet, and Jewish communities across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East prepared for redemption, some selling their property. Arrested by the Ottoman authorities, he was brought before the sultan in September 1666 and chose Islam over death. The movement collapsed for most, but a core of believers read the apostasy as a secret mission, and their descendants, the Dönme, kept a hidden faith for generations.
PeopleShabbetai Tzevi · Nathan of Gaza
Banned from Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community in 1656 and earning his living by grinding lenses, Baruch Spinoza published his Theologico-Political Treatise anonymously in 1670. It treated the Bible as a human, historical document, argued that faith and philosophy are separate domains, and defended the freedom to philosophise; it caused an uproar and was soon condemned. His Ethics, which identified God with nature, appeared only after his death in 1677.
PeopleBaruch Spinoza
Spanish officials had flogged Po'pay of Ohkay Owingeh and other Pueblo religious leaders as sorcerers and hanged some of them. On 10 August 1680 Pueblo warriors led by Po'pay rose together, killed hundreds of colonists and friars, and drove the Spanish south to El Paso. Spain did not return until 1692.
PeoplePo'pay
On Vaisakhi 1699 at Anandpur, Guru Gobind Singh called for volunteers ready to give their lives for their faith. He initiated five of them as the first Khalsa, a community that tradition says was marked from the start by the Five Ks.
PeopleGuru Gobind Singh · The Panj Pyare
Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, a young Kongolese woman, said that Saint Anthony possessed her. She preached a Kongolese Christianity, led her followers to reoccupy the abandoned capital, and called for peace after decades of civil war. In 1706 she was tried as a heretic at King Pedro IV's court, with the backing of the Capuchin missionaries, and burned at the stake.
PeopleBeatriz Kimpa Vita
John Wesley felt an assurance of God's grace at a prayer meeting. Unwelcome in many parish pulpits, he rode across Britain preaching in the open air, and Methodism was born.
PeopleJohn Wesley · Charles Wesley
A healer and mystic taught that God can be served with joy in every act, not only through scholarship. His followers launched the Hasidic movement.
PeopleIsrael ben Eliezer
Expelled from his home town for preaching that venerating saints and tombs was idolatry, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb found refuge with the emir of Dirʿiyya, Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd. Their alliance created the first Saudi state, whose forces took much of Arabia and sacked the Shiʿi shrine city of Karbala in 1801 (some sources say 1802).
PeopleMuḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb · Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd
Over more than three centuries European and American traders shipped about 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; about 10.7 million survived the crossing. Many came from Kongo and Angola as well as West Africa, and in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti they rebuilt their religions as Candomblé, Lucumí and Vodou. Vodou's spirits, the lwa, draw on Fon, Kongo and Yoruba traditions alike, so Haitian Vodou is not simply a Yoruba religion.
A scholar from Dessau who followed his rabbi to Berlin at fourteen became one of Europe's celebrated philosophers while remaining a practising Jew. His German translation of the Torah with a Hebrew commentary, and his book Jerusalem, which argued that no state may coerce belief and that Judaism binds by revealed law rather than dogma, made him the leading figure of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment.
PeopleMoses Mendelssohn
Korean scholars who had studied Catholic books from China sent Yi Seung-hun to Beijing, where he was baptised in 1784. He returned to baptise others, and a church grew with no missionary present. Joseon authorities outlawed it and killed thousands of believers in waves of persecution through the nineteenth century.
PeopleYi Seung-hun · Andrew Kim Taegon
The National Assembly put the Church's lands at the nation's disposal in November 1789, suppressed monastic vows, and on 12 July 1790 passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, turning bishops and priests into elected, salaried officials. An oath demanded that November split the clergy, nearly all bishops and many priests refusing, and Pope Pius VI condemned the scheme in 1791. In 1793–94 a campaign of dechristianisation replaced Catholic worship with a Cult of Reason and then Robespierre's Supreme Being, before Napoleon's Concordat with Pius VII in 1801 restored Catholic worship under state control.
PeoplePope Pius VI · Maximilien Robespierre · Napoleon Bonaparte · Pope Pius VII
Tradition holds that a Vodou ceremony in a forest clearing launched the revolt that made Haiti the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people. Historians debate the details.
After Kamehameha I died in May 1819 his widow Kaʻahumanu became kuhina nui, co-ruler with the young king Liholiho. Late that year she and the king's mother Keōpūolani led Liholiho to eat publicly with women, breaking the ʻai kapu, and the king ordered the heiau and their images destroyed. Kekuaokalani, keeper of the war god Kūkāʻilimoku, rose in defence of the old religion and died at Kuamoʻo. The first American missionaries landed months later, in 1820.
PeopleKaʻahumanu · Keōpūolani · Liholiho (Kamehameha II) · Kekuaokalani
Joseph Smith published a scripture he said he had translated from golden plates, and organised a church. His followers later trekked west to the Salt Lake Valley.
PeopleJoseph Smith · Brigham Young
A farm woman, Nakayama Miki, said God the Parent spoke through her and called people to the 'Joyous Life'. It became one of the largest of Japan's new religions.
PeopleNakayama Miki
A young merchant proclaimed himself the Báb, the 'Gate', and announced a coming messenger of God. He was executed by firing squad in 1850.
PeopleThe Báb · Ṭāhirih
Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate, read a Christian tract and concluded that visions he had seen were of God and Jesus, and that he was Jesus's younger brother sent to rid China of demons. In 1851 his God Worshippers proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace; they took Nanjing in 1853 and held it until 1864. The war killed an estimated twenty million people.
PeopleHong Xiuquan · Zeng Guofan
On 24 November 1859 John Murray published Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that species arise by natural selection rather than by separate acts of creation. At the British Association meeting in Oxford on 30 June 1860 Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley clashed over the book; no accurate record of what was said survives, and the famous exchange about apes rests on recollections written down decades later. Darwin called himself an agnostic and never an atheist, and his chief defender in America, the botanist Asa Gray, argued that natural selection was compatible with belief in God.
PeopleCharles Darwin · Thomas Henry Huxley · Samuel Wilberforce · Asa Gray
Choe Je-u, born into a fallen yangban family in Gyeongju, said in 1860 that Heaven had given him a teaching to protect the nation and its people, an 'Eastern Learning' to answer the 'Western Learning' of the Catholics. Donghak held that every person bears Heaven within and so all are equal, and it drew a following among the rural poor. The state executed Choe in 1864, but the movement survived and grew.
PeopleChoe Je-u · Son Byeong-hui
Before a further exile to Constantinople, Bahá'u'lláh announced that he was the messenger the Báb had foretold. He taught the oneness of God, of religion and of humanity.
PeopleBahá'u'lláh · ʿAbdu'l-Bahá
Ellen Harmon was a Millerite teenager in Maine when Christ failed to return on 22 October 1844; that December she had the first of the visions that guided a small Sabbath-keeping remnant of the movement. In May 1863 its congregations organised the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists at Battle Creek, and White's counsel shaped its Saturday worship, its health reform and its sanitariums and schools. The church regards her as a prophet sent by God and now counts more than 23 million members.
PeopleEllen G. White · James White · William Miller
Within months of the Meiji Restoration, the new government ordered Buddhist priests, images and titles out of Shinto shrines, splitting two traditions that had shared sacred sites for centuries. Zealots went further and attacked temples and Buddhist images. The state went on to run the shrines as organs of national ritual, until the Allied occupation ordered their separation from government in December 1945.
Pius IX opened the council on 8 December 1869 with about 700 bishops present. After months of argument, in which a minority held that a definition was inopportune, the constitution Pastor aeternus was adopted on 18 July 1870 with only two votes against, most of the minority having left Rome first. It declared that when the pope defines a doctrine of faith or morals ex cathedra he is infallible, and that such definitions are irreformable of themselves and 'not by the consent of the church'. Italian troops took Rome two months later and the council was suspended, never to be closed; Old Catholics broke away, and in Germany Bismarck's Kulturkampf against the Church followed.
PeoplePius IX · Ignaz von Döllinger
Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott set out to find the hidden wisdom common to all religions. They helped bring Hindu and Buddhist ideas to the West.
PeopleHelena Blavatsky · Henry Steel Olcott
On 1 January 1889 the Paiute prophet Wovoka (Jack Wilson) had a vision of renewal through a round dance, and the movement spread across the Plains. On 29 December 1890 the US Seventh Cavalry killed an estimated 150–300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek. The dance did not die there: Caddo, Pawnee, Kiowa and other nations kept it into the twentieth century.
PeopleWovoka
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad took an oath of allegiance from his first followers in 1889 and claimed to be the promised Messiah and Mahdi. Ahmadis face persecution in several countries.
PeopleMirza Ghulam Ahmad
The first formal global gathering of the world's faiths. Swami Vivekananda's greeting, 'Sisters and Brothers of America', made him famous in the West.
PeopleSwami Vivekananda · Anagarika Dharmapala
Theodor Herzl, who had published The Jewish State in Vienna the year before, gathered delegates from many countries in Basel to turn Zionism into an organised political movement. The congress adopted the Basel Programme, which sought a home for the Jewish people in Palestine secured by public law, and founded the Zionist Organization with Herzl as its president.
PeopleTheodor Herzl
From April 1906 William J. Seymour, a Black Holiness preacher, led services in a run-down building on Azusa Street in Los Angeles where Black, white and Latino worshippers spoke in tongues, and visitors carried the practice across America and overseas. It was not the only source: Seymour's teacher Charles Parham had taught tongues-speaking as the sign of Spirit baptism at Topeka, Kansas, since 1901, and revivals in Wales (1904–05), at Pandita Ramabai's Mukti Mission in India (1905) and in Pyongyang (1907) fed a movement that historians now see as having several beginnings.
PeopleWilliam J. Seymour · Charles Fox Parham · Pandita Ramabai
Peyote religion spread among the tribes of Indian Territory in the late 1800s, and in 1918 its leaders incorporated it in Oklahoma as the Native American Church. Members take peyote, a small cactus, as a sacrament. Federal rules of 1883 had banned Native dances and medicine men; in 1978 the American Indian Religious Freedom Act committed the United States to protecting Native religions, and after the Supreme Court allowed Oregon to penalise sacramental peyote in 1990, Congress protected its ceremonial use in 1994.
PeopleQuanah Parker
In January 1918 the Bolshevik government decreed the separation of church from state and school from church: religious bodies lost the right to own property or to exist as legal persons, all church property became the property of the people, and religious teaching was banned from schools. Churches were closed and clergy arrested and shot in waves through the 1920s and 1930s. Stalin reversed course in wartime, receiving three metropolitans on 4 September 1943 and allowing a patriarch to be elected, but Khrushchev closed about half of the Orthodox churches still open from the late 1950s, and only a law of 1 October 1990 restored legal standing to religious organisations.
PeoplePatriarch Tikhon · Metropolitan Sergius · Joseph Stalin · Nikita Khrushchev
On 3 March 1924 Turkey's Grand National Assembly abolished the Ottoman caliphate, sixteen months after ending the sultanate, and sent the last caliph, Abdülmecid II, into exile. Sharif Husayn of Mecca claimed the title within weeks, but the office has never been refilled by general consent.
PeopleMustafa Kemal Atatürk · Abdülmecid II
A Vietnamese religion that unites Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism and Christianity under the Divine Eye. It honours saints as varied as Victor Hugo and Sun Yat-sen.
PeopleNgô Văn Chiêu
When Ras Tafari was crowned Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, some Jamaicans saw it as the fulfilment of prophecy. A faith of African dignity and return grew, later carried worldwide by reggae.
PeopleHaile Selassie I · Leonard Howell · Bob Marley
Regina Jonas studied at Berlin's liberal rabbinical academy and argued in her thesis that Jewish law does not bar a woman from the rabbinate, but the academy did not ordain her. In 1935 Rabbi Max Dienemann examined and ordained her, and she taught, preached and gave pastoral care in Berlin as Nazi persecution tightened. Deported to Theresienstadt in November 1942, she went on working as a rabbi in the ghetto until she was sent to Auschwitz and murdered in 1944.
PeopleRegina Jonas · Max Dienemann
Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered about six million Jews, most of them between the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the end of the war in 1945, by mass shooting, starvation in ghettos and gassing in killing centres; in Hebrew the catastrophe is called the Shoah. The Jewish communities of eastern Europe, where most of the victims lived, were almost wiped out. In the Warsaw ghetto the historian Emanuel Ringelblum's secret Oneg Shabbat group buried an archive of the community's last years, part of which was dug out of the ruins after the war.
PeopleEmanuel Ringelblum
In wartime, on 25 January 1944, Bishop Ronald Hall of Hong Kong ordained Li Tim-Oi as a priest at Zhaoqing in Guangdong, the first woman priest in the Anglican Communion. Under pressure from Canterbury she gave up her licence in 1946, stayed in China through the Maoist years, and died in Toronto in 1992. Sally Priesand became the first woman rabbi ordained by a seminary in 1972; the Church of England voted for women priests in November 1992, ordained the first 32 at Bristol in March 1994, and consecrated Libby Lane as its first woman bishop in January 2015.
PeopleFlorence Li Tim-Oi · Ronald Hall · Sally Priesand · Libby Lane
Farmers dug up a sealed jar of leather-bound books: long-lost texts, many of them Gnostic, and the first complete Gospel of Thomas. They changed what we know about early Christian diversity.
On 1 June 1945 Sukarno proposed to the committee preparing Indonesia's independence five principles for the coming state, among them belief in one God. A draft preamble of 22 June, the Jakarta Charter, added seven words obliging Muslims to follow Islamic law; on 18 August, the day after independence was proclaimed, the words were dropped. The constitution's first principle, Belief in the One and Only God, set the country with the world's largest Muslim population on a path between an Islamic state and a secular one: the government came to recognise six religions, and only in 2017 did the Constitutional Court allow followers of indigenous beliefs to record them on identity cards.
PeopleSukarno · Abdurrahman Wahid
British India was divided into India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947, with Punjab and Bengal cut in two along hastily drawn lines. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs killed one another on a vast scale as some 15 million or more people crossed the new borders.
On 14 May 1948, hours before the British Mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion read a declaration in Tel Aviv establishing a Jewish state in the land the UN had voted to partition six months earlier. Fighting between Jews and Arabs had begun after the partition vote, and the armies of the neighbouring Arab states entered the next day. By the end of the war more than half of Palestine's Arab population, about 700,000 people, had fled or been expelled from their homes and were not allowed to return, an event Palestinians call the Nakba. Two years later the Law of Return gave every Jew the right to settle in the new state.
PeopleDavid Ben-Gurion
On 10 December 1948 the UN General Assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by 48 votes to none, with eight abstentions from the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Article 18 declares that everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change religion or belief and to manifest it in teaching, practice, worship and observance. The 1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights made the right binding on the states that ratified it, and a declaration of 1981 spelled it out; Pew counted 58 countries with high or very high government restrictions on religion in 2023.
PeopleEleanor Roosevelt · Charles Malik · P. C. Chang · René Cassin
Josiah Akindayomi, a prophet of the Cherubim and Seraphim, one of Nigeria's Aladura churches, led a prayer fellowship in Lagos that became the Redeemed Christian Church of God in 1952. When he died in 1980 it had about forty parishes. His successor Enoch Adeboye, a university mathematics lecturer, took over in January 1981; under him the church took on Pentecostal teaching and practice, and in 1983 bought land on the Lagos–Ibadan expressway for the Redemption Camp, where it holds its monthly all-night Holy Ghost Service. By 2004 it reported congregations in more than ninety countries.
PeopleJosiah Akindayomi · Enoch Adeboye
Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today presented a nature-based religion centred on a Goddess. It grew into one of the main branches of modern Paganism.
PeopleGerald Gardner
On 14 October 1956 at Nagpur, B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit jurist who had steered India's constitution, converted to Buddhism and led a vast crowd of fellow Dalits, most of them Mahars, in doing the same. He died seven weeks later; millions of Dalits have followed him since.
PeopleB. R. Ambedkar
On 18 May 1958 Cho Yong-gi and Choi Ja-shil, later his mother-in-law, held a first service in Choi's living room in a poor district of north-western Seoul, with five people present; within a year the congregation met in a tent in her yard. In a city recovering from war the church grew fast, moved in 1973 to Yeouido island on the Han River, and became the largest single congregation in the world, with more than 700,000 members by the early 1990s. Cho retired in 2008, and in 2014 a court gave him a suspended sentence for causing the church a loss through share purchases from his son.
PeopleCho Yong-gi (David Yonggi Cho) · Choi Ja-shil
After the uprising in Lhasa failed, the 14th Dalai Lama escaped to India. In exile, Tibetan Buddhism spread around the world.
PeopleTenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Pope John XXIII opened the Church's windows to the modern world. The council allowed Mass in local languages, embraced ecumenism and, in Nostra aetate, rejected blaming Jews collectively for the death of Jesus.
PeoplePope John XXIII · Pope Paul VI
In 1966 Mao Zedong loosed the Red Guards on the 'Four Olds': old ideas, culture, customs and habits. Temples, churches and mosques were attacked, closed or seized, clergy were persecuted and all public religious life was banned for a decade. After Mao's death in 1976 places of worship reopened, and a 1982 party document again allowed 'freedom of religious belief' under state control.
PeopleMao Zedong
Meeting at Medellín in August and September 1968, the bishops of Latin America issued documents that affirmed the rights of the poor and called the Church away from the privileged few to the side of the impoverished majority. Small base communities, led mostly by laypeople, read the Bible in the light of their neighbourhoods' needs and multiplied across the continent, and the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez gave the movement its name with A Theology of Liberation in 1971. In 1984 the Vatican's doctrinal office under Cardinal Ratzinger warned against its borrowings from Marxism. Archbishop Óscar Romero of San Salvador, shot while saying Mass in 1980, was made a saint in 2018.
PeopleGustavo Gutiérrez · Óscar Romero · Joseph Ratzinger
The Ásatrúarfélagið, devoted to the Norse gods, became an officially recognised religion in Iceland, a milestone for modern Heathenry.
Mass protests drove Mohammad Reza Shah from Iran on 16 January 1979; Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile on 1 February, and on 11 February the army stood aside. A referendum approved an Islamic Republic, and a new constitution made Khomeini its leader under the doctrine of guardianship of the jurist.
PeopleRuhollah Khomeini · Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi
In colonial Burma the monk Ledi Sayadaw urged ordinary laypeople to practise insight meditation, long a specialist monastic pursuit. Twentieth-century Burmese teachers such as Mahāsi Sayadaw and U Ba Khin simplified the methods, their pupils carried them to India and the West, and in 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn created the secular eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course at a Massachusetts hospital.
PeopleLedi Sayadaw · Mahāsi Sayadaw · S. N. Goenka · Jon Kabat-Zinn
Pope John Paul II invited leaders of the world's religions to pray for peace side by side in the town of Saint Francis.
PeoplePope John Paul II
The Babri Masjid was built at Ayodhya in 1528–29 under the Mughal emperor Babur, on a site that Hindu tradition holds to be the birthplace of Rama. Images of Rama were placed inside it in December 1949 and the building was locked; from the 1980s a campaign to replace it with a temple, carried by L. K. Advani's chariot procession of 1990, drew mass support. On 6 December 1992 a crowd of Hindu volunteers, put at about 150,000, tore the mosque down in a few hours while police stood by, and the riots that followed across India killed between 1,700 and more than 2,000 people. In 2019 the Supreme Court gave the site to a trust to build a temple, which opened in January 2024, and granted five acres elsewhere for a mosque.
PeopleL. K. Advani
The Pope and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar signed a joint call for peace, religious freedom and an end to violence in God's name.
Pilgrims bathe where the Ganges and Yamuna meet, joined by tradition by the unseen Saraswati, at a festival held at Prayagraj in 12-year cycles. The government put attendance in 2025 at more than 660 million visits, an official figure that has not been independently counted.
In June 2025 Pew Research Center published its count of the world's religions in 2020: 1.9 billion people, 24.2 per cent of humanity, identified with no religion, up from 23.3 per cent in 2010, while Christians' share fell by 1.8 points to 28.8 per cent and Muslims' rose by 1.8 points to 25.6. The figures measure what people tell censuses and surveys, not belief or practice, and two-thirds of the unaffiliated live in China. The shift is sharpest in the West: the 2021 census found fewer than half of England and Wales Christian for the first time, and 29 per cent of American adults told Pew in 2023–24 that they had no religion.
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