Topic guide · Origins of religion

The Origins of Religion: Göbekli Tepe, the First Gods and How Monotheism Developed

When did humans first worship? Did religion begin with many gods and slowly narrow to one — or did it begin with one Creator and fragment into many? This guide sets out the oldest evidence of religion, what Göbekli Tepe does and does not prove, the main theories of how religion began, and the long debate over whether monotheism or polytheism came first.

What is the oldest evidence of religion?

Religion leaves few direct traces, so archaeologists look for behaviour that has no practical purpose. The earliest candidates are burials. At Qafzeh and Skhul in present-day Israel, early modern humans were buried roughly 100,000 years ago, some with red ochre and objects such as deer antlers. Much later, Upper Palaeolithic sites show unmistakable symbolic life: the Lion-man figurine from Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, about 40,000 years old, half human and half lion; the painted caves of Chauvet in France, more than 30,000 years old; and the elaborate burials at Sungir in Russia, decorated with thousands of ivory beads.

Care for the dead, images of beings that are neither human nor animal, and great effort spent on things that do not feed anyone: together they suggest people who believed in something beyond the visible world. They do not tell us what that something was.

Göbekli Tepe and the origins of religion

Göbekli Tepe, near Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey, was recognized as a Neolithic site by the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt in 1994 and excavated from 1995. Its oldest circular enclosures date to around 9600 BCE. They are ringed by T-shaped limestone pillars, the tallest about 5.5 meters, carved with foxes, boars, snakes, scorpions and vultures. Some pillars have arms, hands and belts in relief: they are stylized beings, perhaps ancestors or gods. The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018.

Was Göbekli Tepe a temple?

Schmidt called it “the first temple”, a ritual centre for hunter-gatherers who gathered from across the region. That idea made headlines because it seemed to reverse the textbook order: religion first, then farming and cities. Later research has complicated the picture. Excavators have since found evidence of houses, food processing and water collection, and some of the fill once thought to be deliberate burial may come from slope erosion. Today most specialists describe Göbekli Tepe as a settlement with monumental ritual buildings rather than a temple only.

Even on the cautious reading, its builders invested extraordinary labour in enclosures and carvings that had no economic purpose. Nearby sites of the same culture, such as Karahan Tepe, show the pattern was widespread. Echoes of History begins here and asks the question the label “oldest temple” skips: worship of whom?

In depth: Göbekli Tepe and the Origins of Religion: what the evidence shows — and what it does not →

How did religion begin? The main theories

• Animism (E. B. Tylor, 1871). Early humans inferred souls from dreams and death, then attributed spirits to animals and nature; gods developed later.
• Social theories (Émile Durkheim). Religion expresses and binds the community; the sacred is society worshipping itself.
• Cognitive science of religion. Minds tuned to detect agents and intentions readily perceive invisible persons behind events; belief in gods is a by-product of normal cognition.
• The “high god” tradition (Andrew Lang, Wilhelm Schmidt). Lang noticed in 1898 that many small-scale societies believed in a single supreme sky-father who made the world. Schmidt developed this into the theory of an original monotheism (Urmonotheismus) that later fragmented. Most anthropologists today reject Schmidt’s full theory, but the high gods he documented are real.

Was monotheism older than polytheism?

The dominant scholarly view is evolutionary: belief moved from spirits to many gods, then to the elevation of one god above the others (henotheism and monolatry), and finally to the claim that only one God exists. In ancient Israel, many historians see this last step completing around the time of the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE.

The scriptures of the Abrahamic religions tell the story the other way. Genesis begins with one God and one human family; the gods of the nations come later. The Qur’an teaches that every people was sent a messenger with the same message — “worship God and shun false gods” (16:36) — and that humanity acknowledged its Lord before history began (7:172). On this view polytheism is a forgetting, not a starting point.

History cannot settle the question directly, because writing begins long after religion does. What it can do is test the patterns each view predicts. One pattern is striking: across Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan and many traditional cultures, the crowded pantheon is often headed by a remote creator or sky-father who is honoured but rarely approached. Echoes of History reads that pattern as the trace of an earlier belief in one Creator — “the gods of the ancient world are not the ancestors of monotheism; they are its wreckage” — and labels it clearly as an argument.

What is the oldest monotheistic religion?

• Atenism, under the pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BCE), is the earliest recorded attempt to worship one god exclusively. It did not survive him. See Ancient Egypt.
• Judaism is usually described as the oldest monotheistic religion still practised, with roots in the second millennium BCE according to tradition.
• Zoroastrianism, centred on Ahura Mazda, is also very old, but the date of its founder Zarathustra is uncertain by many centuries.

The difference between God and gods

The gods of polytheism are beings inside the world: they are born, they quarrel, they can be defeated, and they rule particular cities, seas or skies. The God of classical monotheism is not one more being in the world but its source — outside space and time, uncaused, the reason anything exists at all. That is why philosophers say monotheism is not “polytheism minus all the gods but one”. It is a different idea of the divine. For the philosophical side of the question, see Does God exist?

Frequently asked questions

What is the earliest known religious site?

Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, with monumental enclosures from about 9600 BCE, is the oldest known site built on a large scale for ritual gatherings.

Why is Göbekli Tepe important?

It shows that hunter-gatherers could organize monumental, symbolic building before farming, pottery or writing — suggesting that shared belief and ritual helped shape the beginnings of civilization.

Did civilization begin with religion?

Göbekli Tepe made that idea popular. The evidence shows ritual and monumental building early in the Neolithic, but most researchers now see religion, settlement and the first farming developing together rather than one simply causing the others.

Why do ancient religions share similar stories?

Explanations include shared human psychology, contact and borrowing between neighbouring cultures, common experiences such as floods, and — in religious readings — a shared original revelation remembered differently.

Did humans invent the idea of God?

Naturalistic theories say yes, as a by-product of how human minds and societies work. Religious traditions say the idea was received. Echoes of History argues the second view while laying out the evidence for both.

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