ABSTRACT
This chapter explores an alternative interpretation of globalization through the theoretical lens of cultural hybridity and religious synthesis. By accounting for the historical evolution of religions, it argues that religious institutions were the first engines of globalization and their founding fathers its first agents. It demonstrates how religions in antiquity became the first laboratories of the globalization processes due to their capacity of reducing social complexity and how they managed to create and shape the political and administrative models that the first world city-states and empires needed in order to govern over their territories. Syncretism was the mechanism with which religions assimilated and reshaped the vastness of symbolic capital of their social environment. The relationship of religion and urbanism is also examined and there is a demonstration of how the interface design of temples re-territorialized the religious and political landscape.
