Istwa Nou

Buddhism, Christianity and later Islam became world religions by travelling the trade routes. Buddhism spread across southern and eastern Asia along the paths of expanding commerce. Manicheism, proclaimed by Mani in Sassanian Persia in the middle of the third century, went west to the Roman empire and east through interior Asia as far as China. Judaism took hold in southern Arabia in the early first millennium CE along the land and sea routes of the peninsula. Christianity was in the Horn of Africa and in India before the fourth century CE, usually brought by merchants. Hinduism travelled the Indian Ocean links into what is now Indonesia. Islam later crossed the Sahara to West Africa and sailed to Indonesia, again mostly through trading believers. Aksum is the case worth naming. King Ezana converted in the fourth century CE, and Coptic Christianity is still the faith of millions of Ethiopians and Eritreans. Augustine of Canterbury landed in Kent in 597 to begin converting the Anglo-Saxons.

The Council of Nicaea met in 325 CE to settle what Christians were required to believe about the nature of Christ. The argument was carried by Alexander, the Egyptian patriarch of Alexandria, and by his student Athanasius, who between them defeated the position that Christ was a created being. Out of the council came the doctrine of the Trinity and the statement of belief still recited as the Nicene Creed. Every later century of Christian theology in Europe was built on that foundation, and it was fixed in place by two men from Egypt. The other decisive figure of the period was also African. Augustine was born in the fourth century at Hippo, in what is now Algeria, of Amazigh descent, and his writing on sin, grace, predestination and the standing of the church shaped Catholic doctrine for sixteen hundred years and handed the Protestant reformers their arguments as well. He learned his trade inside an African intellectual tradition that had already produced Tertullian and Cyprian.