Hello and welcome to another episode of the ancient warfare answers series of podcasts.

I almost tricked myself there.

This is episode 147.

I'm Yaspo Orthaus.

I'm the editor of Ancient Orpher magazine.

With me is Mari Dham.

He's the assistant editor.

And today, Mari and I are going to be talking about holy wars and whether they require monotheistic religions or not.

What do you think?

Well, the short answer is no.

So Natasha's asked us about pre-biblical.

So whether I'm not sure if that means pre-old Testament, in which case, well, we don't know, but there are

some wars over religion in that early period. And of course, wars over religion have become

very non-PC, and there's been a long movement in historiography to try and find other reasons for these battles,

even though, you know, we have several wars in the ancient Greek and Roman period, which

are called sacred wars. They are wars to control sacred spaces, and there are wars about

religious, what's the word?

There are, you know, the most famous one, of course, is the Battle of Marathon

is meant to be punishing the Athenians for the sacrilegious act of burning

sadis back in the Ionian revolt in 494.

So there are wars about religion that are monotheistic before the New Testament of the Bible

and also roughly at the same time of some of the books of the Old Testament of the Bible.

...