Limits of religious diffusion

Assembled from 20 blocks · 2 evidence · 27 related

1. Story
2. The observation that the historical edges of religious traditions correspond closely to physical and political discontinuities rather than to the intellectual persuasiveness of competing claims: the Sahara and the Taklamakan, the open Pacific and the Atlantic before ocean-capable shipping, the Himalaya, and the frontiers of organised rival states. Where a route ended, or where a state was strong enough to refuse, diffusion slowed or stopped. Buddhism's contraction in India, the disappearance of the Church of the East from China after the ninth century, and the long decline of Zoroastrianism in Iran are the cases used here — and each of them is causally contested, which is precisely the point: the limits are visible in the record while the reasons for them are not.
3. Knowledge
4. Limits of religious diffusion
5. Measured global religious composition, 2010-2020
6. Connections
7. Church of the East (Nestorian Christianity)
8. Zoroastrianism
9. Measured global religious composition, 2010-2020
10. Fall of the Sasanian Empire to the Rashidun Caliphate
11. Zoroastrian migrants reach Gujarat — the Parsi settlement
12. Limits of religious diffusion
13. Christianity
14. Islam
15. Hinduism
16. Judaism
17. Indian Ocean maritime trade network
18. Evidence
19. Following the fall of the Sasanian Empire to the Rashidun Caliphate in 651 CE, Zoroastrian communities in Iran declined over centuries under a combination of fiscal disadvantage, social pressure, episodes of persecution and conversion, and some groups migrated eastward and by sea to India.
20. A limestone stele 279 cm high, bilingual in Chinese and Syriac, records roughly 150 years of the Church of the East in China, names the missionary Alopen as received by Emperor Taizong in 635, and calls the church 'the Luminous Religion of Daqin'; its Chinese text uses Daoist and Buddhist vocabulary.