ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a sense of some of the tolerance issues and manifestations that arose from early societies and continue into the emergence and maturation of the great classical civilizations. It focuses the relatively primitive societies, though the category admits of a considerable spectrum, from hunting and gathering to more organize agricultural settings. The chapter deals with patterns of tolerance, and limitations on tolerance, in some of the early and classical civilizations, with attention particularly to Egypt and the Middle East, to China, and to Greece and Rome. It also deals with tolerance amid the development of some of the more complex early religions, the faiths that went beyond characteristic polytheism, in which, however, consistent missionary strands were absent or at least not fully developed. The chapter also focuses on Judaism, Hinduism and particularly Buddhism, as they emerged in the later centuries BCE.
