Crisis in Early Religion

Mait Kõiv is the associate professor of Ancient History in the University of Tartu, with the main research field in the Ancient Greek history.

Dr. Märt Läänemets is an Orientalist-Sinologist focusing on the field of history of thought and religion in China, classical Chinese and Buddhist texts; he is the President of the Estonian Oriental Society.

PD Dr. Kerstin Droß-Krüpe is a historian of ancient history and currently works as an Akademische Oberrätin at the Ruhr-University Bochum.

Dr. Sebastian Fink is Senior Scientist at the Institute for Ancient History and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Innsbruck.

Religion is closely linked to social development as it often serves as the ideological fundament of a society and one of the foremost expressions of its culture. The articles in this volume are devoted to the study of religious crisis in Anqituity and deal with these pheonomena in the Ancient Near East, Rome, Greece, China and India.

Comparative Analysis of Crisis in Religion

1 Crisis in Early Religion - an Introduction.- 2 The crisis of authentic Buddhavacana in Tipi aka: Is Early Buddhist Sangha's Politics Responsible?.- 3 Prajñaparamita as a crisis-marker in Buddhism.- 4 The involvement of Buddhist monks in the court intrigues in China and Japan during the fourth to the eighth centuries.- 5 The Ugaritic Combat Myth and Egypto-Hittite Relations in the Late Bronze Age.- 6 Crises in the Hittite Religion: Examples of the Prayer of Kantuzili and Plague Prayers of Mursili II.- 7 Divine justice and human competition: signs of crises in Archaic Greece.- 8 When oracles don't come true: Oedipus Tyrannus and oracular crisis. - 9 'The Athenian 'plague' - religion, 'rationality', and ethics'.- 10 A crisis of 'atheism' in ancient Rome? On the perception of nonreligion as a threat in the Roman Empire.- 11 Crisis and transformation of Gnostic Christianity in late Roman and early Byzantine Egypt.