Elements of civilized culture
Religion
Middle Eastern religious thought had a strong influence on the ancient Greeks. The cosmogonies of Egypt, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Anatolia were transmitted in part to the West and formed the basis of much of the cosmogonies of Hesiod and the Orphics before 600 bc, as well as the background for the cosmogonies of Thales and Anaximander in the 6th century bc. There is some influence from the Middle East in Pythagorean and Platonic thinking, but it is often hard to define and still harder to prove in detail. From the early 3rd century bc on, the Middle East began to influence Greek thought increasingly. Babylonian astrology influenced Stoic philosophy, and some Jewish influence on Stoic ethics is likely as well.
Late Egyptian religious speculations were transmitted to the Greeks, especially through the “Physiologists” and Hermetic writers who flourished in Hellenistic Egypt beginning in the 2nd century bc. Astrology and alchemy were transmitted to our time in substantially the forms they received in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt.
With the partial Hellenization of Judaism and its Christian offshoot in the 1st century ad, Jewish influence on the West rapidly became dominant. Most of it came through the Pharisees, but such Jewish sects as the Essenes and Baptists were directly involved.
Even such a heterodox Jewish sect as the Samaritans exerted disproportionately great influence. In the first years of the nascent Christian Church a Samaritan diviner named Simon, later called “Magus,” founded a new faith known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics spread rapidly over both the Roman and Iranian worlds, and by the end of the 3rd century ad they had subdivided into a multitude of different sects that covered a wide spectrum of possible combinations between Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Greco-Roman paganism.
In four centuries Christianity conquered the entire Roman Empire and many outlying regions, thanks to the intensity of its faith and the tenacity with which Christians held to their views, following Jewish models, through the bitterest persecutions.
In the East, Zoroastrianism maintained its hold over the Iranians and neighbouring peoples until the Islāmic conquest, when it was replaced by Islām, itself an offshoot of the monotheistic Judeo-Christian stem.
With the Hebrew Bible (which became the Christian Old Testament) almost the whole of traditional Israelite and early Jewish religion passed into Christianity, which was to a great extent an extension of Judaism. What was lost by the surrender of a large part of Jewish ritual law, with its stress on purity, was compensated by the triumph of monotheism over Greco-Roman polytheism and the transformation of ethical and spiritual ideas in the Greco-Roman world. Judaism itself survived to coexist with Christianity and Islām through all the intervening centuries to our own day.