Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Chronicles and Compendia gathers eight compilations that record religious material, myth, calendar and history without any tradition treating them as scripture.

Two are the working reference works of Babylonian celestial divination. MUL.APIN, compiled around 1000 BCE, catalogues the fixed stars and their risings and sets out schemes for the lunar calendar. Enuma Anu Enlil, some seventy tablets holding on the order of seven thousand entries, reads the moon, sun, weather and stars as signs from the gods, and is the central document of the divinatory tradition from which horoscopic astrology later grew.

Two record Mesoamerican religion through the lens of Spanish colonization. The Florentine Codex, compiled by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun with Nahua elders, is the fullest surviving source for Mexica religious practice, and also a document made to help missionaries suppress what it describes. The Codex Mendoza, commissioned around 1541 by New Spain's first viceroy, records Aztec dynastic history, tribute and daily life, and never reached the Spanish king it was made for after French privateers captured the ship carrying it.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas preserves more early Chinese myth than any other surviving source, while the Huainanzi, presented to the Han emperor in 139 BCE, draws Daoist cosmology and statecraft into one argument about aligning government with heaven. The Qissa-i Sanjan is the Parsi community's own foundational migration account in Persian verse, and the Primary Chronicle, the earliest history of the Kievan Rus, carries the founding narrative of Christianity in the East Slavic lands, read by historians as shaped and partisan rather than a plain record.