Central Asian Religion
Bamiyan Buddha statue carved into a cliff
(modern Afghanistan), about 500 AD
Because Central Asia's wide grasslands are so easy to ride horses or camels over or walk over, there have always been a lot of people coming and going through Central Asia, bringing their beliefs with them. So people in Central Asia believed in all kinds of different gods in all kinds of different ways.
The first people we know much about from Central Asia were the Scythians, from around 450 BC. According to Herodotus, the Indo-European Scythians had many gods, like their southern neighbors and distant relatives the Greeks and the Hittites.
About this same time, though, Cyrus the Great converted to the West Asian religion of Zoroastrianism, and some people in Central Asia thought they might convert to Zoroastrianism too. Many people worshipped the god of justice and contracts, Mithra.
When the Zoroastrian kings exiled the Buddhists from the Parthian Empire about 150 AD, these men and women brought Buddhism north with them to Central Asia, where many people became interested in the new religion. Not much later, this same movement brought Buddhism to China.
About the same time, Christian missionaries also began to come from West Asia to Central Asia, where they succeeded in getting some people, especially in Armenia, to convert to Christianity. Other people in the same area converted to Judaism about the same time.
In the 800's AD, most of the people living in the south-western part of Central Asia converted to the new religion of Islam. There were both Sunnis and Shiites in Central Asia. Many people followed the Sufi branch of Islam. But in Russia, people became Christian about the same time, while in Mongolia to the far east, most people stayed Buddhists.
To find out more about Central Asian history, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Tales
Told in Tents: Stories from Central Asia
by Sally Pomme Clayton (2000). For kids.
Empire Of The Mongolians, by Michael Burgan (2005). Young adult.
