Ancient people, being unable to understand many natural phenomena - for example, lightning or floods - came up with supernatural explanations for them. So there was a belief in the gods, at their whim, controlling the forces of nature.
However, in the past few millennia, the gods have acquired another, no less important function: they became judges who punished people for certain faults and, accordingly, supported a certain set of ethical norms in society.
Of course, this happened as society developed, and scientists have argued for many decades about what appeared earlier: belief in all-seeing and strictly punishing gods or large groups of people living together with a complex social structure?
The answer to this question seems to have been found by sociologists and anthropologists at Oxford University by studying the beliefs of several hundred ancient communities.
They came to the conclusion that the harsh "moralizing gods" appeared only when there were too many people - and they had a need for some kind of uniting force.
This power, of course, was supernatural, that is, it could control not only nature, but also people.
And thus, it helped to unite the scattered, unfamiliar with each other representatives of ancient cultures, forcing them to cooperate and do common things for the benefit of the whole society.
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Great Vengeance
The gods of the ancient world are extremely cruel and vengeful creatures, severely punishing for the slightest offense. In this they are strikingly different from the deities of modern religions - merciful and forgiving.
To be convinced of this, it is enough to recall the Old Testament: if you believe this sacred text, the strict God of the Jews regularly arranged mass extermination of sinners - from Sodom and Gomorrah, when two cities were completely destroyed by the "rain of brimstone and fire", to the Flood, which did survived by a single godly family.
The hero of the cult film “Pulp Fiction”, before each murder, reads to his future victims a quote from the Book of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel: “And I will perform great vengeance on them with fierce punishments; and they will know that I am the Lord when I have performed My vengeance on them."
Compare it with a quote from the New Testament: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven."
To understand exactly when the gods became judges and what caused this, scientists at Oxford University studied 414 ancient communities that lived in 30 different regions of the world over the past 10 thousand years.
Each community was assessed on 51 criteria in terms of the complexity of the social structure (size of the largest settlement, the presence of a written code of conduct, etc.), as well as four signs of belief in supernatural forces - including whether people believed in punishing gods that punish certain offenses.
It turned out that the first religion known to us, where the gods began not only to personify the forces of nature, but also engaged in moralizing, were the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.
Around 2800 BC, during the Second Dynasty, the supreme god Ra-Sun had a daughter, Maat, the goddess of justice, law and order.
The Maat Code (translated, her name means "truth", "order") formed the basis of the ancient Egyptians' ideas about ethics - about how to act in a given situation.
It was believed that by acting differently, a person violates harmony and brings misfortune on himself and on everyone around him. Therefore, the observance of the rules of Maat was closely monitored in society.
Further, a similar transformation of the indifferent forces of nature into a supernatural oversight body took place in ancient states throughout Eurasia: in Mesopotamia (c. 2200 BC), Anatolia (1500 BC) and China (1000 BC). BC.).
After that, in the first millennium BC, the active development of religions began, which already united several states at once - such as Buddhism or Zoroastrianism.
Uniting, including, and a single moral code.
Nikolay Voronin
