The peoples of the Silk Road in its early decades followed many different religions. In the Middle East, many people worshipped the gods and goddesses of the Greco-Roman pagan pantheon. Others were followers of the old religion of Egypt, especially the cult of Isis and Osiris. Jewish merchants and other settlers had spread beyond the borders of Israel and had established their own places of worship in towns and cities throughout the region. Some people in the Middle East followed Mithraism, a religion originally of Persian origin that became popular in the armies of Rome as well as among the general populace; central to its theology was a struggle between good and evil symbolized by the sacrifice of a sacred bull. Elsewhere in the Middle East, and especially in Persia and Central Asia, many people were adherents of Zoroastrianism, a religion founded by the Persian sage Zoroaster in the 6th century BCE. It, too, posited a struggle between good and evil, light and darkness; its use of fire as the symbol of the purifying power of good was probably borrowed from the Brahamanic religion of ancient India. The Greek colonies of Central Asia that had been left behind after the collapse of the empire of Alexander the Great had, by the first century BCE, largely converted from Greco-Roman paganism to Buddhism, a religion that would soon use the Silk Road to spread far and wide.
