1000 BCE–1 CE: (Population Growth and the Evolution of Religious Systems — Dunbar’s Research Offering Thought-Provoking Proposals About How the Increased Pop…

1000 BCE–1 CE: (Population Growth and the Evolution of Religious Systems — Dunbar’s Research Offering Thought-Provoking Proposals About How the Increased Population Sizes and the Growth in Scale of Societal and Political Groupings over the Previous Several Thousand Years Led Toward New Kinds and Wider Regional Reach of Systems of Religious Observance and Allegiance, the Shift from Local Spirit and Ancestor-Based Religions to Scriptural Proselytizing Religions Being Partly a Response to the Social Challenge of Maintaining Cohesion in Increasingly Large and Complex Societies Where Face-to-Face Relationships Alone Could No Longer Bind the Community Together): Dunbar’s *How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures* offers thought-provoking proposals about how the increased population sizes and the growth in scale of societal and political groupings over the previous several thousand years led toward new kinds and wider regional reach of systems of religious observance and allegiance. The argument connects the demographic and political transformations of the first millennium BCE to the religious transformations that Ehret has documented in the main text. As populations grew and political units expanded from villages to kingdoms to empires, the social technologies that had maintained cohesion in small-scale societies — face-to-face relationships, kinship networks, shared rituals conducted by the entire community — became insufficient. The proselytizing religions of the first millennium BCE — Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Judaism, and eventually Christianity and Islam — provided a new mechanism of social cohesion: shared belief in abstract principles, mediated by scripture and enforced by professional clergy, capable of binding together strangers who would never meet face-to-face into a single moral community. Religion scaled because it had to. The alternative was the dissolution of every political unit larger than a village into its constituent kinship groups. The scriptural religions were, in this reading, social technologies invented to solve the coordination problem of large-scale societies — and they spread along trade routes because trade routes were precisely the corridors along which strangers needed to trust one another.