As Guy Stroumsa has argued perceptively, Late Antiquity (roughly 250-750 C.E.) represents a second "Axial Age," when what we call "religion" asserts itself in ways that revolutionize human societies. In his superb series of lectures published as The End of Sacrifice, Stroumsa also argues that "along with these [religious] transformations came forms of religious and cultural heritage--not from 'Europe' (an over-used term that too often still means Western Europe of Catholic and Protestant tradition), but from the three civilizations of which we are all the heirs: alongside Latin Europe, that of Byzantium, from Constantinople to Moscow ('the third Jerusalem'), and that of Islam, from Baghdad to Cordoba. Byzantium and Islam ended up transmitting to neo-Latin Europe, with a long delay, a portion of their ancient heritages. These are commonplaces, of course, but are nevertheless often forgotten" (p. 129)--or, in the U.S., suppressed or denied.
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