Gods and Empires

A sweeping narrative history of world religions from prehistoric cave rituals to the rise of Christianity, Buddhism, and the classical empires of faith.

Sixty thousand years ago, someone placed flowers on a Neanderthal grave. They had no writing, no cities, no agriculture. But they already believed something lay beyond death. That quiet act of faith set humanity on a journey that would produce every temple, scripture, and prayer the world has ever known.

Dawn of Faith is the first volume of Gods and Empires, a major new narrative history that traces how the world’s great religions were born. This is not a textbook or a survey. It is a story — grounded in the latest archaeology and translated primary sources, told with the pace and vividness of a novel.

You will crawl into Ice Age caves where artists painted by torchlight in chambers so remote that reaching them meant hours of crawling through darkness. You will stand at Göbekli Tepe, an eleven-thousand-year-old temple complex built before agriculture existed — a discovery that overturned everything historians thought they knew about how civilizations begin. You will witness the extraordinary century that produced the Buddha, Confucius, and the Hebrew prophets within a single generation, and follow the fierce early debates that determined whether a crucified Jewish preacher would be remembered as a prophet or worshipped as God.

From the red ochre burials of the Paleolithic to the mystery cults of Greece and Rome, from the Vedic fire sacrifices of ancient India to the compilation of the Torah in Babylonian exile, from Zoroaster’s vision of cosmic warfare between good and evil to Constantine’s transformation of Christianity into an imperial religion — this book covers thirty thousand years of spiritual history with a depth and energy that brings the ancient world to life.

Subjects include: the origins of religious behavior in early Homo sapiens, shamanism, the Neolithic revolution, Mesopotamian religion, Egyptian theology, Canaanite gods, Zoroastrianism, Vedic Hinduism, the Upanishads, the Buddha and early Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, Greek religion and philosophy, Roman religion, Second Temple Judaism, the historical Jesus, Paul and early Christianity, Gnosticism, Rabbinic Judaism, Mahayana Buddhism, and the Christianization of the Roman Empire.