1000 BCE to 700 CE · Africanspan
Religions with scriptures and missionaries appear along the trade routes
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During the first millennium BCE a new kind of religion took shape, or more precisely a new kind of social ideology backed by religion and carried by teachers and proselytisers. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Judaism belong to the first wave. Christianity, Manicheism and Hinduism follow in the first millennium CE, and Islam arrives in the seventh century. Ehret's wording moves the question from what these systems believed to how they travelled. Written scripture was no novelty, since Egypt had produced sacred texts for two thousand years already, and monotheism was no novelty either. The new thing was scriptural authority combined with organised missionary work, which allowed a whole social and cultural system to be exported rather than a set of beliefs alone. The infrastructure it used was commercial. The roads built to move gold, copper and silk were the roads along which teachers walked and converts were made. Africans were among the architects of the tradition that would travel furthest.
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