Ancient Conjectures, and Fictive Intellectual History

The following text is an extract from a chapter in my forthcoming book, Abstract Conception in Greece and Assyria. It concerns the question of whether or not there was a philosophical basis for the development of religious concepts in antiquity, informing ritual, liturgy, divination, sacrifice, and the worship of images; and therefore, as a consequence, philosophy was not the exclusive possession of the Greeks in the 1st millennium B.C.E. 
This argument of course turns the received view...