Religion in the Ancient World

Definition

Religion (from the Latin Religio, meaning 'restraint’, or Relegere, according to Cicero, meaning 'to repeat, to read again’, or, most likely, Religionem, to show respect for what is sacred) is an organized system of beliefs and practices revolving around, or leading to, a transcendent spiritual experience. There is no culture recorded in human history which has not practiced some form of religion.
Religion (which, in ancient times, is indistinguishable from mythology) concerns itself with the spiritual aspect of the human condition, gods and goddesses (or a single personal god or goddess), the creation of the world, a human being’s place in the world, life after death and how to escape from suffering in this world or in the next.  And every nation has created its own god in its own image and resemblance.
The world’s oldest religion still being practiced today is Hinduism (know to adherents as 'Sanatan Dharma’, Eternal Order) but, in what is considered 'the west’, the first records of religious practice come from Egypt around 4000 BCE. The Egyptian Creation Myth tells us that, at first, there was only Ocean. This ocean was breadth-less and depth-less and silent until, upon its surface, there rose a hill of earth (known as the ben-ben, the primordial mound, which, it is thought, the pyramids symbolize) and the great god Ra (the sun) stood upon the ben-ben and spoke, giving birth to the god Shu (of the air) the goddess Tefnut (of moisture) the god Geb (of earth) and the goddess Nut (of sky). Ra had intended Nut as his bride but she fell in love with Geb. Angry with the lovers, Ra separated them by stretching Nut across the sky high away from Geb on the earth. Although the lovers were separated during the day, they came together at night and Nut bore three sons, Osiris, Set and Horus, and two daughters, Isis and Nephthys. Osiris, as eldest, was announced as 'Lord of all the Earth’ when he was born and was given his sister Isis as a wife. Set, consumed by jealousy, hated his brother and killed him to assume the throne. Isis then embalmed her husband's body and, with powerful charms, resurrected Osiris who returned from the dead to bring life to the people of Egypt. Osiris later served as the Supreme Judge of the souls of the dead in the Hall of Truth and, by weighing the heart of the soul in the balances, decided who was granted eternal life.
This same pattern of creation of existence by a supernatural entity who speaks all into being, of how the world came to be as it is (the canopy of sky over the earth, for example) other supernatural beings emanating from the first and greatest one, a son who is a powerful entity himself who is killed or dies for his people and comes back to life for the good of his people and an afterlife similar to an earthly existence is repeated in religious texts from Phoenicia (2700 BCE) to Sumer (2100 BCE) to Palestine (1440 BCE) to Greece (800 BCE) and finally to Rome (c. 100 CE). The Phoenician tale of the great god Baal who dies and returns to life to battle the chaos of the god Yamm was already old in 2750 BCE when the city of Tyre was founded (according to Herodotus) and the Greek story of the dying and reviving god Adonis (c. 600 BCE) was derived from earlier Phoenician tales based on Tammuz which was borrowed by the Sumerians (and later the Persians) in the famous Descent of Innana myth.

This theme of life-after-death and life coming from death and, of course, the judgement after death, gained greatest fame through the evangelical efforts of St. Paul who spread the word of the dying and reviving god Jesus Christ throughout ancient Palestine, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome (c. 42-62 CE).
The religion of Christianity made standard a belief in an afterlife and set up an organized set of rituals by which an adherent could gain everlasting life. In so doing, the early Christians were simply following in the footsteps of the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Phoenicians and the Greeks all of whom had their own stylized rituals for the worship of their gods. After the Christians, the Muslim interpreters of the Koran instituted their own rituals for understanding the supreme deity which, though vastly different in form from those of Christianity, Judaism or any of the older 'pagan’ religions, served the same purpose as the rituals once practiced in worship of the Egyptian goddess Hathor (c.3000 BCE) over five thousand years ago: to lend human beings the understanding that they are not alone in their struggles, suffering and triumphs, that they can restrain their baser urges and that death is not the end of existence.