This Fleeting World

Acceleration: The Agrarian Era 49
contact than ever before, binding the whole of Eurasia into the largest system
of exchange on Earth.
The increased reach of political, commercial, and intellectual exchange
networks may explain another important development during this era: the
emergence of religious traditions that also extended over huge areas—the
first world religions. Whereas earlier religious traditions usually claimed
the allegiance of particular communities or regions, world religions claimed
to express universal truths and to represent universal gods—reflections,
perhaps, of the increasing scale of imperial states, and their need to reconcile
the beliefs of diverse populations over very large areas.
The first world religion was probably
Zoroastrianism, a religion whose Topics for Further Study
founder may have come from central Buddhism
Asia during the sixth century bce, at Catholicism, Roman
about the time when Cyrus I founded
Christianity
the Achaemenid empire. Buddhism was
Confucianism
founded soon after in northern India
Hinduism
during a period of rapid urbanization
Islam
and state expansion. Its great period of
Judaism
expansion came early during the first
Manichaeism
millennium ce, when it began to spread
in central Asia, China, and southeastern
Asia. The influence of Christianity
Zoroastrianism
expanded within the Roman empire until, during the fourth century ce, it
became the official religion of the state, under the emperor Constantine.
Both Buddhism and Christianity spread into central Asia and eventually
reached China, although of the two only Buddhism made a significant
impact on Chinese civilization. Even more successful was Islam, founded
in southwestern Asia during the seventh century. Islam spread into north
Africa, central Asia, India, and southeastern Asia, carried first by armies
of conquest and later by the Muslim missionaries and holy men known
as “sufis.”
The same forces that gave rise to the first world religions may also
have spurred some of the first attempts at universal generalizations about
reality in early forms of philosophy and science. Although normally associated
with the philosophical and scientific traditions of classical Greece,
such ideas can also be found within the astronomical and mathematical