Peoples of the Ancient Gods, From the Nile to the Baltic

Start on the Nile, where religion maintained ma'at, the cosmic order, through the daily temple cult of gods such as Ra, Amun, Osiris and Isis. The dead were prepared for the journey through the Duat toward the Field of Reeds, and funerary literature runs from the Pyramid Texts to the Book of the Dead.

Turn north to the Levant, where the tablets recovered at Ugarit give the fullest picture of a religion with El as aged head of the pantheon and Baal as the storm god who wins kingship. The Canaanites are known mostly through such tablets and a Hebrew Bible largely hostile to them, which takes up some of their language for God while rejecting their cults.

In southern Mesopotamia the Sumerian pantheon was reordered around Marduk, whose elevation is narrated in the Enuma Elish. Babylonian scribes kept the astronomical diaries and omen series behind later celestial divination, and the deportation of Judeans to Babylon left a lasting mark on Jewish scripture and law.

Their northern neighbours worshipped Ashur at the head of a pantheon largely shared with Babylonia, and their kings framed conquest as his commission. The collection gathered at Nineveh preserved much of the Mesopotamian literary and divinatory tradition that survives today.

Greek religion had no church, scripture or creed. It was the shared practice of sacrifice, festival, oracle and mystery cult addressed to the Olympian gods, from Delphi to Eleusis to the games at Olympia, with Homer and Hesiod the nearest thing to theology.

The Etruscans held the country between the Arno and the Tiber and gave Rome much of its religious apparatus. Their discipline of reading the gods from the liver of a sacrificed animal, from lightning and from prodigies was studied by Roman priests as the Etrusca disciplina, though their language is only partly understood.

Roman religion was a matter of exact ritual rather than belief, with priestly colleges, augurs and Vestal Virgins maintaining the pax deorum while households fed their own lares and penates. Rome adopted Greek Olympians, the Magna Mater, Isis and Mithras before Christianity ended the public cults in the late fourth century.

The Celts were united by related languages rather than a single state, and their religion, served by the druid class, is known through archaeology, Greco-Roman report and the medieval Irish and Welsh literature that preserved its gods in story. Whether the ancient islanders were truly Celts remains a live scholarly argument.

The Germanic settlers of Britain brought a religion of which little direct evidence survives, chiefly place names, weekday names and the goddess Eostre, whom Bede records as giving her name to the Easter month. Their conversion from the late sixth century produced a church culture that copied scripture and vernacular poetry alike.

Finish in the eastern Baltic, the last part of Europe to be Christianized, with Lithuania officially converting in 1387. Because of that, older gods such as the sky god Dievas and the thunder god Perkunas are recorded relatively late and fully, and revivals like Romuva and Dievturiba draw on that record and on folk song.