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History
Main articles: History of religion and Timeline of religion

Detail from Religion, Charles Sprague Pearce (1896). Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.The history of religion refers to the written record of human religious experiences and ideas. This period of religious history typically begins with the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago(3,000 BCE) in the Near East.


Development of religion
Main articles: Evolutionary origin of religions, Development of religion, Anthropology of religion, and Prehistoric religion
There are a number of models regarding the ways in which religions come into being and develop. Broadly speaking, these models fall into three categories:

Models which see religions as social constructions;
Models which see religions as progressing toward higher, objective truth;
Models which see a particular religion as absolutely true.
In pre-modern (pre-urban) societies, religion is one defining factor of ethnicity, along with language, regional customs, national costume, etc. As Xenophanes famously comments:

Men make gods in their own image; those of the Ethiopians are black and snub-nosed, those of the Thracians have blue eyes and red hair.
Ethnic religions may include officially sanctioned and organized civil religions with an organized clergy, but they are characterized in that adherents generally are defined by their ethnicity, and conversion essentially equates to cultural assimilation to the people in question. The notion of gentiles ("nations") in Judaism reflect this state of affairs, the implicit assumption that each nation will have its own religion. Historical examples include Germanic polytheism, Celtic polytheism, Slavic polytheism and pre-Hellenistic Greek religion.


The "Axial Age"
Main article: Axial Age
Karl Jaspers, in his Vom Ursprung...