This article introduces a new online, quantitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history, the Database of Religious History (DRH). The DRH aims to systematically collect information on past religious groups from around the world in a standardized form, providing a novel digital humanities resource for the religious studies community, a forum for scholarly debates, a pedagogical aid, and a platform for testing hypotheses about religious change over space and time. We employ the DRH project as a lens through which to view some larger intellectual issues surrounding the comparative study of religion, the role of functionalism and "big data" in the study of religion, the challenges of large-scale collaborative projects, and the future of science-humanities integration.

As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer big questions about human history. We have serious concerns, however, by the approach to the quantitative coding of historical data taken by the Seshat team, as revealed in the backing data (seshatdatabank.info/nature), as well as by a lack of clarity concerning the degree of involvement of expert historians in the coding process. The apparent lack of appreciation for historical scholarship that this coding strategy displays runs the risk of permanently alienating the community of academic historians, who are essential future collaborators in any project devoted to large-scale historical data analysis. In the present commentary, we present a preliminary critical review of their latest article, “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods Throughout World History” (2019).

This article explores the potential impact and contribution of the Database of Religious History (DRH) project within the field of Cognitive Historiography. The DRH aims to bring together, in a systematic and open-access format, data on religious groups from across the globe and throughout history. By utilizing robust, open-source technologies and best-practice software principles, the DRH constitutes a novel and innovative approach to historical and cultural studies. As a contribution to the scientific study of both religion and history, the DRH offers data amenable to statistical analyses, thus providing tools for assessing diachronic cultural innovation and adaptation, the testing of grand narrative theories of religious change, and for enriching and revitalizing traditional fields such as comparative religions, history of religion(s), and anthropology of religion. In this article we explore the methods employed in collecting and digitizing historical data, identify our unit of analysis, outline the challenges of recruiting historians of various fields, and highlight the DRH’s methodological potential for both Religious Studies and Cognitive Historiography.

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This essay provides a translation of the travelogue of the eminent Oirat Buddhist lama Sumba Kanbo Yeshe Baljor (1704–1788) as he made his way to the sacred Mount Wutai. Among the many details this candid account reveals is the fact that Buddhists from the Tibetan Plateau did not travel to the sacred mountain of Wutai in China for the sake of pilgrimage, but in order to foster established relationships with Mongol patrons along the way. Sumba Kanbo spent seven months on the road in 1774 en route to Wutai (compared with only one month at the mountain itself), and during that time he was received by Mongol nobility for whom, in exchange, he contributed to the creation of ‘surrogate’ pilgrimage sites in Mongolia and more generally to the ‘Buddicisation’ of Mongolia. Sumba Kanbo’s account provides a unique window into the emergence of Buddhism in Mongolia and the manner in which this phenomenon depended upon both the political and religious bonds formed between lamas such as Sumba Kanbo and Mongol nobility, commoners and landscape that these lamas encountered on their peregrinations.