“The geography and history of Central Eurasia are inseparable.”¹
 

The religions deemed monotheistic centered around Ahura Mazda and YHWH do not appear to have originated in isolation. The generation and development of these religions took place in societies that were shaped by the social and physical worlds around them. The last chapter sketched out some of the building blocks that define the category of “religions deemed monotheistic” and hinted that their origins can be traced to ancient societies that adapted to survive what some might consider to be “difficult” social and geographic environments. This chapter will examine the category of “mobile pastoralism” to which these societies (that appear to have given rise to these religions) belong. The consistency with which this category of societies seems to be defined by environmental (and social) pragmatic responsiveness makes sense of the emergence of religious innovations such as the building blocks underlying these religions deemed monotheistic. Thus, it is difficult to deny the influence (direct or indirect) of agriculturally marginal landscapes on these societies and the religions they produced.

Among the building blocks that appear to be integral to the category of “religions deemed monotheistic” are: 1) emphatic concepts of “Truth”; 2) perceptions of “incompatibility” with other religions (primarily those deemed polytheistic); 3) perspectives that separate social or “ethnic” identities from religious identities; 4) written (or oral) texts deemed religious; 5) a focus on (a) supernatural agent/s that exist beyond the material world. In his assessment of “secondary religions” Assmann suggests that all in this category are “world” religions, an important acknowledgement of the social and geographic mobility of religions deemed monotheistic.² Additionally, the last chapter pointed to what could be called the “chronological” mobility of these religions: the survival of some key building blocks that define each religion across time and space. These types of mobility appear to be connected to the function of building blocks that define this category of religions and may be the result of mobile pastoral developmental contexts.