Determining when a culture starts is a big challenge when researching for the data. There are many conflicting sources on when a religion started. However, the definition we are using is when the religion becomes organized enough to have been classified as a religion of its own. Some cultures have existed as fractured groups but were not recognized as a part of the same religious structure.
Determining when a culture ends is a much harder challenge to tackle. Because the nature of culture often entails rises and falls, this means some cultures that had been dead get revived in later periods. For sake of data curation, however, the choice was made to say the culture’s decline, or “end date”, is when the culture experiences a significant decline in its practice relative to the broad historical timeline. Some examples include when a country fully converts to a specific culture, such as the Christianization of Rome, to intense and lengthy persecutions. However, these dates are at best estimations of the end date, and can change should more information be discovered.
One challenge we have encountered is the difficulty in verifying sources. While the sources page lists only one link, the true number of sources used is about four to eight per culture. Through reading into the sources, paired with having to cross reference historical events were mandatory in the acquisition of data. Challenges we have encountered are dates sometimes ranging as wild as thousands of years, to various conflicting sources arguing for who really founded the religion. As a result, we have had to have a dedicated researcher sift through the data to fact check, and double check data. We made the data to the best of our ability, but there will and may be inaccuracies hidden throughout the data simply because of the limitations of data acquisition.
< Back to Graph