According to the study of human culture, human relatives (also known as hominids) date back 100,000 years. What distinguished humans from animals was the uniquely human concept that humans can feel and think. One of those thoughts and feelings was about the sacred. Hominids admired something great but at the same time feared it. Dating back to the Paleolithic era, religion has always played a significant role in many societies such as Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek. The similarity of all three ancient societies was that they were a polytheistic religion, but the differences were their centers, the physical orientation of the gods and the tasks of divine law. The centers were extraordinary sacred places, which was one of the functions that constituted a civilization. . It was a place where all the important things happened. The centers were made up of expensive materials such as stone, brick, marble etc. and they always had a difficult approach. The first center was built in Mesopotamia and they were called ziggurats. These religious buildings had a fence on the outer layer with a power center (whoever controlled the center, controlled the people). The difficulty of accessing the ziggurat was its extremely immense and boring stairs. The Egyptian centers were pyramids. Rulers spent a lot of goods, slaves, free labor and time to create this showpiece for funerals and religious ceremonies. These pyramid architectures are hundreds of feet tall like the Pyramid of Giza, which is taller than a skyscraper. Moving on to the Greeks, their centers were built on the top of the acropolis. Marble temples were built on the top which provided an excellent source of defense. About 50,000 years ago, hominids worshiped an... middle of paper... Punishments varied depending on the status of the criminal/victim. Free men were punished lightly compared to slaves. The Mesopotamian religion established a system of fines. The task of the Pharaoh in Ancient Egypt was not to make everyone equal but to ensure that everyone respected the gods and maintained control of the social order. It composed and was collected just like the Nile River. The Greek religion established an ethical system. They had reciprocity where, for example, if a farmer honored the gods, his crops prospered. It was everyone's responsibility to uphold justice, and if they didn't, the gods punished everyone for not being penalized. All three ancient civilizations were very similar due to the belief in many gods. The factors of sacred shrines, the physical characteristics of gods, and the divinity of kings are what differentiate and separate civilizations.