Religions of the world’s countries

Religion — the cradle of science, art and culture

Long before universities and academies, temples and monasteries kept, enlarged and passed on knowledge. That is why religion has its own section on our site, before science and culture. A few facts:

• Ancient Egypt. Temples had “Houses of Life” — scribal workshops where texts on medicine, astronomy and ritual were copied and kept.
• Mesopotamia. The earliest cuneiform records (Uruk, about 3200 BC) are accounts of temple households; Babylonian priest-astronomers recorded the movements of the heavens for centuries.
• India. The Buddhist monastery of Nalanda became one of the largest centres of learning of the ancient world; its ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
• Middle Ages. Monasteries copied and preserved the books of antiquity; the University of Paris grew out of the cathedral school of Notre-Dame. Al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, founded in 859 together with a mosque, is named by Guinness World Records as the oldest higher-learning institution still operating.
• Armenia. The monk Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet (405); the first book translated into Armenian was the Bible. In the 13th–15th centuries the monastic universities of Gladzor and Tatev were at work.
• Genetics and cosmology. In 1856–1863 the monk Gregor Mendel crossed peas in the garden of his monastery in Brno, and in 1866 he described the laws of heredity — the beginning of genetics. Canon Nicolaus Copernicus set out the motion of the Earth around the Sun (1543); the priest Georges Lemaître derived the expansion of the universe in 1927.
• Art. The theatre of ancient Greece grew out of festivals in honour of Dionysus; the staff notation still used today is credited to the monk Guido d’Arezzo (11th century); the priest Komitas collected several thousand Armenian folk songs and laid the foundation of a national Armenian style in music.

Today science and religion are different paths to knowledge, but they share a history, and it is part of every people’s culture.

Sources: A. H. Gardiner, “The House of Life” (1938); Encyclopaedia Britannica — cuneiform, Universities of Paris, Mesrop Mashtots, Mendel’s “Experiments with Plant Hybrids”, Copernicus, Lemaître, Guido d’Arezzo, Komitas; UNESCO — Nalanda Mahavihara; Guinness World Records.