(V):

> Not sure if it is the first. I've heard of Zoroastrianism some years back, and also of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Latter I've read and dates back to the same sorta period (or so they say now, it might change again!) ... There is a good probability Moses would have been exposed to the teachings if the dates are now right... I fso they date back to 2000BC - 1500BC.

The Hermetica were written in the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD. While some have argued that they date back to the Pharaonic period in Egypt. However, they are more likely to have arisen shortly before Plato's time in the 6th century BC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Hermeticum

It is interesting because scholars believed that the same ideas in the Hermtica influenced Greek philosophers in antiquity. The first book of the Hermetica introduces Poemandres, the shepherd of men who introduces the disciple to the divine. This is an idea that Christianity borrowed 6 centuries later. This comes as no surprise since St. Paul had so much contact with Greeks in the 1st century AD.

http://www.gnosis.org/library/hermet.htm

Although dated to the 6th century BC, the Hermetica is probably based on older ideas. Zarathustra is believed to have lived in northeastern Iran or Southwestern Afghanistan between 200 and 1500 BC. However, it is likely that his ideas descent from something much older.

Before there was Europe or Asia and all the modern divisions of its peoples, there were the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the Bronze-age predecessor culture that shaped the language and religion of our modern world. The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived during the late Neolithic era (4000 BC), but some archaelogists believe that they may have lived in the early Neolithic (7500 BC). Their languages certainly gave rise to many modern language families such as Indo-Iranian, Turkic, Semitic, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Latin, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans

The Indo-European religion can be partially reconstructed using comparative mythology and linguistics, and many Gods that might seem unrelated in different cultures suddenly appear to be the same Gods, although their mythologies and names are mutated over the centuries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_religion

Looking at the Indo-European religion makes me wonder if a small group of people within it had developed a more abstract concept of God and a concept of the duality of good and evil. This god would be descended from Deiwos, the main deity of the Indo-European pantheon. If that happened, it was probably very late in the development of the Indo-European culture. I suspect that it happened separately in at least two places.

One would be among the Semitic people who founded Chaldea. According to the Old Testament, Abraham was Chaldean, and the Old Testament never claims that Abraham invented monotheism. There are a couple of passages where Abraham is addressed by others who are clearly monotheists like him, they are Semitic like him, but they belong to entirely different clans. So it would seem that Monotheism was there, but it was with Abraham that Judaism finds its first, earliest expression.

The other place would be among the Indo-Iranians who lived further east and were geographically separated from the Semitic people's of Anatolia. The Zoroastrians also developed a monotheist view of the universe, but with a more clearly defined abstract duality of good and evil.

There were others too, such as the partial monotheism of the cult of Aten during the reign of Akenaten (Amenhotep IV) between 1353 and 1336 BC. Atenism was considered a great heresy in Egypt because Akenaten sought to get rid of polytheism and replace it with a single supreme deity. The religion died with Akenathen and the old Egyptian polytheism was restored by his successor Tutankhamun. It is likely that this cult of Aten was the predecessor of the Hermetica that came 7 centuries later. Belief in Aten is truly old, going back to the 18th century BC as evident in the Tale of Sinuhe, a text written some 500 years before the reign of Akenaten. This text is older than the Old Testament. It must be pointed that Atenism was really a politically motivated religion that identified Akenaten with the supreme god Aten. By making himself the supreme god, Akenaten ensured that he had absolute control over all of Egypt, including the powerful priestly class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atenism

A good question would be whether these forms of monotheism arose separately or whether they had a common predecessor. Scholars cannot agree on this because there is weak archaelogical evidence and because some scholars would probably not want to take the risk of claiming that the Abrahamic religions have a predecessor much older than the Old Testament.